Recreating tests and examples using Octave under Linux

[YehorYudinIPP]

Dear Andrew,

I tried to recreate the examples you provided in the documentation and the paper. My runs were made using Octave GNU 5.2.0 on Ubuntu 20.04.6, and I noticed several issues.

The most apparent ones are related to plotting, namely :

1. the LaTex formatting did not work for me: the subscripts are displayed as underscores
2. the 'plot graph' option does not generate a legend for the plot
3. the 'plot' option does not generate a plot caption

Furthermore, even though the MEX function is compiled, the performance is relatively slow, e.g. average 1000s per slice integral for swallowtail catastrophe. Would you expect this order of magnitude of runtime, given the parallel for loops most likely would not work with Octave?

All the best,
Yehor

[AndrewGibbs]

Dear @YehorYudinIPP ,

Thanks for raising these. I'm finally looking into this now. I have just tried using an Ubuntu OS with Octave too. Replies below correspond to your enumeration above.

1. If you change 'interpreter', 'latex' to 'interpreter', 'tex' in the optional plotting arguments, does this fix the issue? It did for me!
2. Unfortunately, my graph gets created just fine. Please can you give me an example piece of code? For example, PathFinder(-1,1,[],[1 0 2 0],100,10,'plot graph') works fine for me. Edit: I'm using Octave 6.4.0. Perhaps this is why we are observing these differences? I expect this is cause of the issue as I'm using Ubuntu 22.04.
3. What do you mean by plot caption? Do you mean title of a sub plot?

Regarding the computation time, in the cuspCatastrophe.m example, each pixel of the plot corresponds to a different contour integral. The numPixels = 150 parameter means there are $150^2=22500$ contour integrals to evaluate, so $1000s/22500=0.04s$ average CPU time per integral on Octave (without parallelisation) sounds very plausible to me.

Best wishes and thanks again,

Andrew

[YehorYudinIPP]

Hello @AndrewGibbs,

Thank you for your comment! Your note on the comute time makes sense, it seems like a resonable time scale.

I tried to use Windows Subsystem for Linux with Ubuntu 24.04 to run PathFinder examples, and I have some local issues due to intraction of Octave and graphics drivers, apparantly, once I resolve those I will tell if rendering works fine!

All the best,
Yehor