[VA] SRC #012b - Then and Now: Root

[Fernando del Rey]

I’ve written a short program for the HP-71B that will solve the problem for polynomials of degree up to a few hundred, using brute force with the Math ROM’s PROOT function.

What I found out is that, for polynomials of degree 149 and beyond, the roots with the minimum absolute value have always an absolute value of:

0.80651359926

I have tried with polynomials of degree up to several hundred always getting the same minimum absolute value, so I am assuming that this value would be the same for the polynomial of degree 10000 in Valentin’s OP. But I don’t have a hard proof for it, it’s just a guess.

I ran my program using Emu71/Win, where it takes just 3 or 4 seconds to get the result for degree 150. On a real 71B it would take several minutes, but I haven’t measured it.