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woadwarrior01yesterday at 1:16 PM1 replyview on HN

My first thought on CAG was that it sounds a bit like bolting on an MCP server onto SymPy (AFAIK, the closest OSS thing to Mathematica). And it turns out someone has already done that.

https://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/computer_algebra_mcp/


Replies

pbronezyesterday at 1:37 PM

I wonder how this will compare, long term, to giving LLMs python sandboxes. Why implement an MCP server for a single library when you can give the LLM an interpreter running a distribution with arbitrarily many libraries?

Probably the trick is teaching the LLM how to use everything in that distribution. It’s not clear to me how much metadata that SymPy MCP server bakes in to hint the LLM about when it might want symbolic mathematics, but it’s definitely gonna be more than “sympy is available to import”

Also, reading through TFA, Wolfram is offering more than a programming language. It includes a lot of structured general purpose information. I suspect that increases response quality relative to web search, at least for a narrow set of topics, but I’m not sure how much.