19 Frequently asked questions

Why are movements so bumpy?
Archimedes Geo3D needs hardware accelerated 3d graphics. In case your graphics adapter doesnīt support this, rotating the scene and dragging will be slow and ’bumpy’. This will be the case in particular under linux when mesa-software-rendering is used.
Why is Archimedes so fast?
Archimedes uses hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics.
Why does the command-line not contain all constructions?
In the first version Archimedes was for synthetic geometry only. For typical problems (like in textbooks used at school) an input line was introduced to version 1.2. The most important commands are available, and more are to come in the future.
Why isnīt there a built-in CAS?
There are several reasons for this. One of them is speed. To display a locus-surface, thousands of object-positions must be ’played through’. Symbolic calcuations are too slow for that. Eventually there will be interfaces to established CAS. Even now the syntax for expressions is compatible to CAS like Maxima or MuPAD. To get the partial derivatives of a heightfield you can simply copy the expression (right-click into the textbox, as ctrl-c will result into copying the current image to the clipboard) and paste it in Maxima. Now add ’diff(’ before and ’,x)’ after the expression and get the first partial derivative. This can be pasted into Archimedes afterwards.