TensorTrace

- tensor networks made easy!

Tips and Troubleshooting

Screen Resolution: the TensorTrace GUI has been designed for resolutions between 1280x720 and 2560x1440. At higher resolutions (i.e. 3840x2160) the GUI elements (which have fixed pixel width) may appear undesirably small. Pressing shft+B will cycle through several scaling options, which may help to remedy this issue.

Autosave: the TensorTrace app is still at a relatively early stage of development and may crash unexpectedly. However every few minutes the current project will autosave as "autosave.ttp" which is located in the "%\AppData\Local\TensorTrace" directory, so recovery of a project in the event of a crash may still be possible. Help improve TensorTrace by sending bug reports to the contact email at the bottom of the page!

Progress of Solver: searching for the optimal contraction order in a tensor network with many tensors can take TensorTrace a significant amount of time. Unfortunately TensorTrace cannot output the progress of the current search to the screen (as switching between the search code and the screen output code is not feasible). However TensorTrace produces a log file "search_log.txt" located at "%\AppData\Local\TensorTrace" which contains information about the status of the search in progress.

Speed of Solver: TensorTrace is written entirely in the "GameMaker Studio 2" language, including the parts of the code that numerically solve for the optimal contraction order of a network. Needless to say, the GameMaker language is not particularly well-suited to scientific computation. While TensorTrace can solve many large networks in a reasonable amount of time, for exceptionally large networks (say N > 20 tensors) one could consider use instead of a contraction solver written in a high-performance language like C++ (https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6112).