Sorry not too much has been happening in this project so far, we've had a bunch of exams/job applications going on this month. But as a lot of this is getting wrapped up for now, so hopefully you will start to see updates more often.
We gave our first presentation of the semester about a month ago, and followed with several two-week goals. These were:
Design and implement a user interface
Correctly format input
Define rules for one-sided arithmetic
On the first, we hoped to use Mathjax as our interface. However, though we could display our equations, getting feedback on what terms were clicked, where they were moved, etc. was proving difficult. So instead we hoped to write our own displayer. We were able to construct an xml string from our backend, but we're still tinkering with a nice display/feedback to the backend.
The third is to avoid writing specific code for each case, much like what happened our first semester. This has been done by determining which operations will be supported, and what common rules govern them. We hope to implement:
Commutativity (a+b -> b+a)
Distribution (a(b+c) -> ab + bc)
Factoring (x^2 + 2x + 2 -> (x+1)^2) and vice versa
Logarithmic operations (There's several of them)
Variable combination (2x + 3x -> 5x)
Solver
So far, most of these rules have been defined, and we hope to write them up as soon as possible.
That's all we have to say for now, but you'll hear from us soon
Zach and Joe
