The GAP 4 package `Memoisation’

A persistent memoisation framework for the GAP computational algebra system. Persistent memoisation is the practice of storing the output of a function permanently to a disk or a server so that the result can be looked up automatically in the future, avoiding any known results being recomputed unnecessarily.

Installation

GAP now has a package manager, which can be used to install any GAP package. To get the latest development version of the Memoisation package, run:

gap> LoadPackage("PackageManager");
gap> InstallPackage("https://github.com/gap-packages/Memoisation.git");

Examples

Use MemoisedFunction to wrap a function and start saving its outputs to disk:

gap> double := x -> x * 2;;
gap> memo_double := MemoisedFunction(double);
<memoised function( x ) ... end>
gap> memo_double(3);
6
gap> memo_double(6.4);
12.8

This will store the outputs of the double function in a directory called memo/double/, in a machine-readable format. Subsequent calls of memo_double(3) will be looked up on disk instead of being recomputed.

One can specify various arguments to MemoisedFunction. For example:

gap> power := MemoisedFunction({x, y} -> x ^ y,
>                rec(funcname := "power_number",
>                    cache := "file://arithmetic_results",
>                    hash := k -> StringFormatted("{}_to_the_{}", k[1], k[2]),
>                    pickle := String,
>                    unpickle := Int));;
gap> power(2, 4);
16
gap> power(10, 5);
10000

will store the outputs of power in human-readable files with descriptive filenames.

Many more options are available. See the package documentation for a full description.

License

Memoisation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the BSD 3-clause license.

For details see the files COPYRIGHT.md and LICENSE.

Citing

Please cite this package as:

[TP20] M. Torpey & M. Pfeiffer, Memoisation (GAP package), Persistent memoisation in GAP, Version X.Y (20XX), https://github.com/gap-packages/Memoisation.

Acknowledgement

Memoisation was created as part of the OpenDreamKit project: https://opendreamkit.org/

This part of the project is summarised in this report.

This infrastructure is part of a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 676541.