Why do we tolerate Mathematica?
I think few will disagree that in a perfect world, we would analyse to our heart’s content everything up until the last byte of source code of any software if we so wished. Nevertheless, I’m also sure that very few of us have the conviction to believe in this perfect world to the degree of not using Mathematica or try to use free software. This is why I was trembling in fear and feeling supremely impotent yesterday during the Mathematica presentation. The presentation was very good. In fact, I was astounded when I saw that apparently Mathematica solved a considerably-sized travelling salesman problem (TSP) in what seemed like an instant, if that’s really what it did. I don’t know why I was the only who expressed amazement. Either Mathematica didn’t really solve a TSP, or solving an NP-hard problem is becoming easier than I thought, and I’ve been living in isolation from the rest of the mathematical world. I know that these amazing Mathematica features will acquire many followers. They
