Macek Project - overview
This project presents a set of tools and routines for reasonably efficient combinatorial computations with representable matroids, especially for matroid constructions and for some structural tests. (If you do not know what a matroid is, then this project is likely not for you.) The program is intended both to help with everyday routines that a matroid-researcher faces (almost) every day, and to allow for long exhausted computations of matroid classes and their properties.
So far, the program deals with matroids represented by matrices over finite fields and partial fields. Many common matroids are distributed with the program, and new ones may be easily entered. An easy manipulation with sets of matroids is supported. One may pivot the matrices, delete or contract elements, and exhaustively generate extensions of matrices. Structural tests for minors, equivalence, branch-width, etc, are also implemented in the project. From version 1.2 also "abstract" tests for representability and for isomorphism are available. (More functions are planned for the future.) Read the complete manual, also in PDF.
The program is freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. See Copying for details.
NZ origin
The development of Macek started in 2001 during my wonderful postdoc experience at the Victoria University of Wellington, NZ (2000-2002), supported by NZ Marsden Fund research grant to Geoff Whittle. In 2002 version 1.0 has been released, and in 2005 version 1.2.Current state
Currently, the project is sleeping for nearly 2 years, but hot new functions are planned really soon...Oh no, the project is really dead now. I have just added a new version 1.2.12 to improve compilation on some platforms (such as Mac), but nothing really new and no spare time left to work on Macek.
RIP....
Acknowledgments
Besides original support from NZ Marsden Fund, the development of Macek has been supported partly by Czech research grant GACR 201/05/0050.Main thanks belong to Geoff Whittle for his motivation, support and encouragement during early Macek development. From the list of other researchers who contributed me helpful ideas and thoughts about practical Macek use I may mention Steven Archer, Sandra Kingan, Xiangqian Zhou, or Paul Wollan.
Copyright (c) 2001--2011 Petr Hlineny.
