Question: Defects in PolynomialIdeals package.

Hello,

I am Seonhwa Kim, a mathematical researcher in Korea. Recently, I have extensively used Maple to compute character varieties of 3-manifolds. Several months ago, I obtained some strange results in Maple which implies a contradiction in theory.  I have been struggling with these issues since it is usually about enormous polynomial systems.  Eventually, I could figure out that the issues are caused by a defect in Maple and were able to construct a minimal working example to produce wrong computations in Maple.  I am writing this post to report them.

This is mainly about the PolynomialIdeal package.  Along with the documentation in Maple, If an ideal J is radical, PrimeDecomposition and PrimaryDecomposition should have the same result.  But, as we see the following, the result of PrimeDecomposition and PrimaryDecomposition are different although J is a radical ideal.

The problem seems to be that the PrimaryDecomposition command in Maple sometimes produces incorrect results.

We can compute the primary decomposition of J by hand.  It should be <x> and  <y, x-1>.

I double-checked this by the other software;Macauley2, Singular, and Magma, for example, you can see it as follows.

Secondly, not only for PrimaryDecomposition but also PrimeDecomposition may produce an incorrect result.

Here is a minimal working example.

Maple tells us a compatible result of prime and primary decomposition of a radical ideal J.

But the first component of J,  < b-1, c-a+1 >, contains the third component < a, b-1, c+1 >.

It contradicts with the definition of Primary decomposition. So the correct answer should be  < b - 1, c - a +1 >, <a,b,c>.

I also checked that  Macaluey2, Singular and Magma. They all say that my hand computation is correct. as follows.

I have used Maple 2017 by the license of my institute (Korea Institute for Advanced Study).

When I noticed these defects, I thought it would be fixed in the newest Maple version.

So, I have tried my examples by Maple2019  free trial, but It also has the same problem. 

I guess this problem is not reported or recognized yet. 

I hope this problem will be fixed as soon as possible.

Thank you for attention.

Sincerely,

Seonhwa