# Question: Error, (in factors) Bad inputs to diophant.

February 14 2013 by
false
Maple 16

2

Hello,

I am facing the error message "Error, (in factors) Bad inputs to diophant." raised by a call to

factors(p, {I, sqrt(3)})

for a polynomial p in 7 variables (with integer coefficients). Unfortunately, the error is not reproducible: After some thousand calls to factors (with different polynomials) this error suddenly occurs.

1. Interestingly, it does not depend on the actual polynomial, but rather on the number of calls to factors. That means if I change the order of the calls, the error occurs at a different polynomial (i.e. the one that caused the error earlier will pass just fine).
2. If I call factors immediately after the error occured using the same arguments, strangely enough no error occurs.
3. Without a splitting field, that is factors(p), the error does never show up.

Unfortunately I could not find any documentation of this error message and can not make any sense out of the weird circumstances under which it occurs. This is also why I could not yet construct a setup that will reliably reproduce the error.

I hope that someone can tell under which circumstances this error message is produced and what might be its cause.

Thank you very much,

ErikP