By far not every feature of polymake system is developed by the polymake project team itself. Instead, we purposely rely on the expertise of various research groups in the community. It is one of the main goals of our project to increase the interoperability of all the fascinating publicly available geometric software. And last but not least, having quite constrained man-power and time resources, it is obviously much easier to interface a well-tested, ready-to-use software package than to implement everything from scratch.

The external software used in polymake can be divided in two categories:

1. Libraries implementing essential parts of the core functionality.
   GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP) (version 4.1.2)
   A well-known implementation of integer, rational, and floating-poing arithmetic (and beyond) with unlimited precision. It became a standard arithmetic engine in many geometric and algebraic software packages in the last years.
   polymake makes massive use of the GMP integers and rationals via own C++ wrapper classes.
   cddlib (version 0.92)
   by Komei Fukuda, Institute for Operations Research, ETH Zürich.
   Contains the double description method (dual Fourier-Motzkin) for convex hull and vertex enumeration, as well as a dual simplex LP solver, both implemented for floating-point and unlimited precision rational numbers.
   lrslib (version 4.1)
   by David Avis, McGill University.
   Contains the reverse search method of Avis and Fukuda, and a primal simplex LP solver, both using unlimited precision arithmetic.
   Due to license agreements and/or kind allowance of the authors, the libraries are packed together with the polymake distribution; you don't need to download and install them separately. We are keeping track of their further development and always include versions which are most actual at the moment of releasing polymake distributions.
2. Useful extensions.
   nauty (version 2.0)
   by Brendan McKay, Australian National University.
   The program dreadnaut from this package is used for checking isomorphy of graphs as well as combinatorial equivalence of polytopes.
   TOPCOM (version 0.10.0)
   by Jörg Rambau, ZIB.
   Explores triangulations of points configurations.
   vinci (version 1.0.5)
   by Benno Büeler, Andreas Enge, and Komei Fukuda.
   Computes the volume of polytopes using floating point arithmetic.
   LattE
   by Jesus De Loera and his co-authors.
   LattE is a software dedicated to the problems of counting and detecting lattice points inside convex polytopes, and the solution of integer programs. LattE contains the first ever implementation of Barvinok's algorithm. LattE stands for "Lattice point Enumeration".
   bastat
   by Loic Pottier.
   Computes the interior integral lattice points.
   porta (version 1.3.2)
   by Thomas Christoph and Andreas Loebel, ZIB / Uni Heidelberg.
   An implementation of Fourier-Motzkin elimination. This program seems not to be further developed nor maintained any more; moreover, the limited precision arithmetic used in it makes it fail on complex problems. We offer an interface mostly for historical reasons.

   Visualization

   JavaView (version 3.03)
   by Konrad Polthier, Samy Khadem, Eike Preuss, Ulrich Reitebuch,
   Sonderforschungsbereich 288, TU Berlin.
   Visualizes 3D- and 4D-polytopes (and much more).
   SplitsTree (version 4)
   by David Bryant and Daniel Huson, Universität Tübingen.
   Visualization of phylogenetic trees.
   geomview (version 1.8.1),
   Geometry Center, University of Minnesota.
   Visualizes 3D- and 4D-polytopes.
   Graphlet (version 5.0.1),
   Universität Passau.
   Visualizes and explores graphs. The development and support seem to be discontinued.
   POVRAY
   3D- and 4D-visualization by high-end ray-tracing.

   Topology

   homology
   by Frank Heckenbach, Uni Erlangen-Nürnberg
   An efficient program computing homology groups of simplicial complexes.
   GAP
   The famous group-theoretical software package. Can be used to analyze the fundamental group of a simplicial complex.

You should download and install these packages on your own, provided you accept the license agreements. Don't merge them into the polymake directory tree, as they might get overwritten by the next polymake upgrade.

For your convenience, the interface components for external software are kept in separate rule files. The auto-configuration routines defined there try to find the installed software (usually by examining your PATH variable). In the case of failure, the rule file gets disabled until you install the lacking software package and repeat the auto-configuration ( polymake --reconfigure ).

At any rate, we strongly recommend you to install some visualization software (preferably JavaView), as polymake were much more boring without all these colorful pictures.

Note: Version numbers given in the descriptions are not binding. These are the latest versions that we are aware of and proven to work with `polymake`. You are free to use other versions, provided the compatibility (API and/or interchange file format, whatever appropriate) is preserved.