In engineering and applied mathematics, polynomial systems arise whose solution sets contain components of different dimensions and multiplicities. In this article we present algorithms, based on homotopy continuation, that compute much of the geometric information contained in the primary decomposition of the solution set. In particular, ignoring multiplicities, our algorithms lay out the decomposition of the set of solutions into irreducible components, by finding, at each dimension, generic points on each component. As by-products, the computation also determines the degree of each component and an upper bound on itsmultiplicity. The bound issharp (i.e., equal to one) for reduced components. The algorithms make essential use of generic projection and interpolation, and can, if desired, describe each irreducible component precisely as the common zeroesof a finite number of polynomials.

Many polynomial systems have solution sets comprising multiple irreducible components, possibly of dierent dimensions. A fundamental problem of numerical algebraic geometry is to decompose such a solution set, using oating-point numerical processes, into its components.

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PHoM is a software package in C++ for finding all isolated solutions of polynomial systems using a polyhedral homotopy continuation method. Among three modules constituting the package, the first module StartSystem constructs a family of polyhedral-linear homotopy functions, based on the polyhedral homotopy theory, from input data for a given system of polynomial equations f (x) = 0. The second module CMPSc traces the solution curves of the homotopy equations to compute all isolated solutions of f (x) = 0. The third module Verify checks whether all isolated solutions of f (x) = 0 have been approximated correctly. We describe numerical methods used in each module and the usage of the package. Numerical results to demonstrate the performance of PHoM include some large polynomial systems that have not been solved previously.

Homotopy continuation methods have proven to be reliable and efficient to approximate all isolated solutions of polynomial systems. In this paper we show how we can use this capability as a blackbox device to solve systems which have positive dimensional components of solutions. We indicate how the software package PHCpack can be used in conjunction with Maple and programs written in C. We describe a numerically stable algorithm for decomposing positive dimensional solution sets of polynomial systems into irreducible components.

Abstract. We show how to use numerical continuation to compute the intersection C = A∩B of two algebraic sets A and B, where A, B, and C are numerically represented by witness sets. Enroute to this result, we first show how to find the irreducible decomposition of a system of polynomials restricted to an algebraic set. The intersection of components A and B then follows by considering the decomposition of the diagonal system of equations u − v = 0 restricted to {u, v} ∈ A × B. One offshoot of this new approach is that one can solve a large system of equations by finding the solution components of its subsystems and then intersecting these. It also allows one to find the intersection of two components of the two polynomial systems, which is not possible with any previous numerical continuation approach.

In memory of Konstantin Alexandrovich Sevast’yanov, 1956–1984. We prove that any pair of bivariate trinomials has at most 5 isolated roots in the positive quadrant. The best previous upper bounds independent of the polynomial degrees were much larger, e.g., 248832 (for just the non-degenerate roots) via a famous general result of Khovanski. Our bound is sharp, allows real exponents, allows degeneracies, and extends to certain systems of n-variate fewnomials, giving improvements over earlier bounds by a factor exponential in the number of monomials. We also derive analogous sharpened bounds on the number of connected components of the real zero set of a single n-variate m-nomial. 1

All isolated solutions of the cyclic-n polynomial equations are not known for larger dimensions than 11. We exploit two types of symmetric structures in the cyclic-n polynomial to compute all isolated nonsingular solutions of the equations efficiently by the polyhedral homotopy continuation method and to verify the correctness of the generated approximate solutions. Numerical results on the cyclic-8 to the cyclic-12 polynomial equations, including their solution information, are given.

To classify positive dimensional solution components of a polynomial system, we construct polynomials interpolating points sampled from each component. In previous work, points on an i-dimensional component were linearly projected onto a generically chosen (i + 1)-dimensional subspace. In this paper, we present two improvements. First, we reduce the dimensionality of the ambient space by determining the linear span of the component and restricting to it. Second, if the dimension of the linear span is greater than i + 1, we use a less generic projection that leads to interpolating polynomials of lower degree, thus reducing the number of samples needed. While this more ecient approach still guarantees | with probability one | the correct determination of the degree of each component, the mere evaluation of an interpolating polynomial no longer certi es the membership of a point to that component. We present an additional numerical test that certi es membership in this new situation. We illustrate the performance of our new approach on some well-known test systems.

We present a distribution-free model of incomplete-information games, both with and without private information, in which the players use a robust optimization approach to contend with payoff uncertainty. Our “robust game” model relaxes the assumptions of Harsanyi’s Bayesian game model, and provides an alternative distribution-free equilibrium concept, which we call “robust-optimization equilibrium, ” to that of the ex post equilibrium. We prove that the robust-optimization equilibria of an incomplete-information game subsume the ex post equilibria of the game and are, unlike the latter, guaranteed to exist when the game is finite and has bounded payoff uncertainty set. For arbitrary robust finite games with bounded polyhedral payoff uncertainty sets, we show that we can compute a robust-optimization equilibrium by methods analogous to those for identifying a Nash equilibrium of a finite game with complete information. In addition, we present computational results.