Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

ACTIS: Algorithmic Coding Theory in Sage

Functional Description

The aim of this project is to vastly improve the state of the error correcting library in Sage. The existing library does not present a good and usable API, and the provided algorithms are very basic, irrelevant, and outdated. We thus had two directions for improvement:

1. renewing the APIs to make them actually usable by researchers, and

2. incorporating efficient programs for decoding, like J. Nielsen's CodingLib, which contains many new algorithms.

After a year on the project, which started October 1st, 2014, we have been able to completely rethink and rewrite the API to a new structure able to support many mathematical constructions and integrate it in Sage. We also implemented numerous code classes and decoding algorithms, including cyclic codes over any finite field and list decoding of GRS codes, which are not available in Maple, Magma and Mathematica. As integrating code in Sage is a slow process, which requires external developers, we attended two Sage workshops (Sage Days 66 in Liège and Sage Days 70 in Berkeley) and welcomed one at Inria Saclay http://wiki.sagemath.org/GroupeUtilisateursParis#mercredi-1er-juillet-2015-module-de-codage-actis-pour-sage to spread the word on the project and meet the main Sage developers. We're now trusted members of the community, and we were able to integrate several patches in Sage.

• Contact: David Lucas

• URL: https://bitbucket.org/lucasdavid/sage_coding_project/wiki/Home

• One can check a full list of accepted and pending ACTIS patches for Sage here : http://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/18846 .