Opened 10 years ago
Last modified 8 years ago
#13028 new enhancement
mpmath import problem warning?
Reported by: | dsm | Owned by: | jason, jkantor |
---|---|---|---|
Priority: | minor | Milestone: | sage-6.4 |
Component: | numerical | Keywords: | |
Cc: | eviatarbach | Merged in: | |
Authors: | Reviewers: | ||
Report Upstream: | N/A | Work issues: | |
Branch: | Commit: | ||
Dependencies: | Stopgaps: |
Description
A rather subtle bug just ate several hours of my (and Benjamin's) time, so for the sake of future sufferers, it's probably worth documenting and wondering if we can find a way to make sure this doesn't happen. The bug relates to trac #12455, which introduces symbolic Airy functions and uses mpmath for numerical evaluation.
The manifestation is unusual: without the patch, we have
sage: import mpmath sage: from sage.libs.mpmath import utils as mpmath_utils sage: mpmath_utils.call(mpmath.airyai, 3,4, prec=500) 0.0354943008052438353507905704856075851248207412675096681263890254113384424359941551501461978539207259766557679623911357156186928332753550261698746599899
but with the patch (after moving an import to avoid a circularity), we have
sage: import mpmath sage: from sage.libs.mpmath import utils as mpmath_utils sage: mpmath_utils.call(mpmath.airyai, 3,4, prec=500) [...] /Users/mcneil/sagedev/sage-5.1.beta0/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/mpmath/libmp/libintmath.py in python_bitcount(n) 88 if bc != 300: 89 return bc ---> 90 bc = int(math.log(n, 2)) - 4 91 return bc + bctable[n>>bc] 92 OverflowError: cannot convert float infinity to integer
even though we're not using any of the new functions, and it works fine for (say) prec=300 and lower!
This turns out to be because the patch created a new module airy.py
in functions, and it was being imported in functions/all.py. mpmath determines its backend in libmp/backend.py by attempting to import sage.all, which fails (because it's not ready yet), and so mpmath decides it's not in Sage and uses the Python backend. This results in using math.log on a really big number, which leads to the OverflowError?. It's quite unlikely that a beginner would ever guess this happens -- because it *works* whenever the precision is low enough, so many of the standard tests one might try would be passed.
Would there be a good place to insert a verification that our mpmath knows it's in Sage?
Change History (6)
comment:1 Changed 9 years ago by
comment:2 Changed 9 years ago by
- Cc eviatarbach added
I got this bug with the patch in #2516 with hypergeometric((10, 10), (50,), 2.)
, where I say it was due to an mpmath limitation before seeing this ticket. It seems indeed to be a circular import problem; I moved the import from mpmath import hyper
into a function rather than have it at the top and it works.
comment:3 Changed 9 years ago by
- Milestone changed from sage-5.11 to sage-5.12
comment:4 Changed 8 years ago by
- Milestone changed from sage-6.1 to sage-6.2
comment:5 Changed 8 years ago by
- Milestone changed from sage-6.2 to sage-6.3
comment:6 Changed 8 years ago by
- Milestone changed from sage-6.3 to sage-6.4
I can't reproduce this with the current patches in #12455. Is there a different way to trigger the problem?