Installation and setup

After downloading the source code from GitHub, open Matlab/Octave and navigate to the PathFinder folder. Then run

addPaths;

from the root directory, to add all necessary paths to the Matlab search path.

The more computationally expensive parts of PathFinder have been written in C, to compile as MEX functions (Matlab executable). When running Matlab on Windows, this requires an extra step. When compiling on Octave, this can also require an extra step, depending on your OS; see this page for details

Compile the MEX codes for your system by running compileAll.m. This works with Octave or Matlab and only needs to be done once for each.

To test the code works, try running

PathFinder(-1, 1, @(x) sin(x), [1 0 0], 100, 10, 'plot')

This approximates the integral

\[ \int_{-1}^1\sin(x)\exp(\mathrm{i}100x^2)\mathrm{d}x=0, \]

and will produce a simple plot of the contour deformation.

You could also try running the codes in the ‘examples’ subfolder.