balancing-kappa
At its defaults it draws why the product route stops: two condition numbers and their product. The two Gramians of a 22-state model of McMillan degree 10, and what each route to the Hankel singular values is charged. κ(P) = 1.26·10¹⁸ and κ(Q) = 2.16·10¹⁸. The square-root route works with RᵀS, whose condition number is their geometric mean, 1.65·10¹⁸; the route that eigendecomposes PQ works at 2.72·10³⁶, which is past 1/u = 4.5·10¹⁵ — the point at which nothing small survives at all. The Gramians themselves are right: this one agrees with its closed form to 2.15·10⁻¹³. What is lost is lost in the last step, to a product nobody had to form.
balancing-kappa is one function in lib/figures/gramian.js —
the bound known before the computation — hankel singular values, and the product that halves them. Everything below came out of it during this build, at
arguments taken from the essays rather than invented for this page. A figure here is the
figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.
At its defaults
Drawn even though every essay passes arguments — which on this site is every essay, at 100% of placements since the standard pass. A default nothing exercises is a trap for the next essay to call this with none, and this is the page where a default that has drifted from the figures around it becomes visible.
The two Gramians of a 22-state model of McMillan degree 10, and what each route to the Hankel singular values is charged. κ(P) = 1.26·10¹⁸ and κ(Q) = 2.16·10¹⁸. The square-root route works with RᵀS, whose condition number is their geometric mean, 1.65·10¹⁸; the route that eigendecomposes PQ works at 2.72·10³⁶, which is past 1/u = 4.5·10¹⁵ — the point at which nothing small survives at all. The Gramians themselves are right: this one agrees with its closed form to 2.15·10⁻¹³. What is lost is lost in the last step, to a product nobody had to form.
degree: 10
The arguments are the ones The bound that is known in advance passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The two Gramians of a 22-state model of McMillan degree 10, and what each route to the Hankel singular values is charged. κ(P) = 1.26·10¹⁸ and κ(Q) = 2.16·10¹⁸. The square-root route works with RᵀS, whose condition number is their geometric mean, 1.65·10¹⁸; the route that eigendecomposes PQ works at 2.72·10³⁶, which is past 1/u = 4.5·10¹⁵ — the point at which nothing small survives at all. The Gramians themselves are right: this one agrees with its closed form to 2.15·10⁻¹³. What is lost is lost in the last step, to a product nobody had to form.
degree: 4
The arguments are the ones The product nobody had to form passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The two Gramians of a 22-state model of McMillan degree 4, and what each route to the Hankel singular values is charged. κ(P) = 2.69·10¹⁸ and κ(Q) = 4.12·10¹⁸. The square-root route works with RᵀS, whose condition number is their geometric mean, 3.33·10¹⁸; the route that eigendecomposes PQ works at 1.11·10³⁷, which is past 1/u = 4.5·10¹⁵ — the point at which nothing small survives at all. The Gramians themselves are right: this one agrees with its closed form to 2.14·10⁻¹³. What is lost is lost in the last step, to a product nobody had to form.
degree: 14
The arguments are the ones The product nobody had to form passes. A value drawn at the generator's defaults instead would be a picture no essay asked for and no assertion has been run against.
The two Gramians of a 22-state model of McMillan degree 14, and what each route to the Hankel singular values is charged. κ(P) = 2.76·10¹⁹ and κ(Q) = 1.3·10¹⁸. The square-root route works with RᵀS, whose condition number is their geometric mean, 5.99·10¹⁸; the route that eigendecomposes PQ works at 3.59·10³⁷, which is past 1/u = 4.5·10¹⁵ — the point at which nothing small survives at all. The Gramians themselves are right: this one agrees with its closed form to 2.14·10⁻¹³. What is lost is lost in the last step, to a product nobody had to form.
What it checked while drawing
Every figure above asserted its own claims on the way to being drawn, and a claim that failed
would have failed the build rather than drawn a wrong picture. Those assertions used to leave
no trace at all: a passing one returned true and the only evidence the figure had
checked anything was that nothing crashed. The list below is what they actually said, collected
by running this generator with an observer installed — not a description of
what it is believed to check.
9 distinct claims across 4 sets of arguments, grouped below by shape — because most of them are one sentence with a different number in it, and how many separate times that sentence was put to the test is the informative part.
a degree the Gramians can carry
a degree the state dimension can carry
a grid fine enough to have modes and coarse enough to draw
a Lyapunov equation with a solution
a system with a known eigenbasis
an actuator and a sensor on the grid
matmul shapes agree
the Gramian agrees with its closed form
the product route is past the point where anything survives
Against the rule
It calls a factoriser without drawing a factorisation
(controllabilityGramian, observabilityGramian),
so the rule is written down as not applying, with the reason:
the bars are condition numbers of two Gramians; the Gramian's agreement with its closed form is asserted at 10⁻¹⁴ inside the generator and no factor of any matrix is drawn
The exemption list is the interesting half of the rule rather than an escape hatch — it is
where a decision about a figure had to be argued in one line. residualcheck
refuses an exemption that is not doing work, and rejected ten of the fifteen written for the
expansion's figures on exactly that ground: a figure whose vertical axis is a residual
satisfies the rule by construction, and touching a factoriser does not by itself require an
entry.
Across the library: the rule bites on 192
of 346 generators —
174 print a residual and
18 are exempt with a published reason;
154 factorise nothing.
Read from lib/residual-rule.js, which is the same body the gate enforces from,
and the gate's last check fails the build if this page and it disagree about any generator.
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every figure on this list. That is what makes the list worth publishing rather than keeping in a check script.
The bound that is known in advance
Almost every error on this site is measured after the fact. Balanced truncation has one that is computable before the reduced model exists, in a norm of a function rather than of a residual — and on ordinary problems it is not an upper bound that is loose. It is attained.
The eigenvalue problem that is not linearThe conditioning that rises with the ceiling
Higher moments multiply a contour method's ceiling by K and grade its block Hankel over ρ to the 2K, so the two knobs are the same knob. One division per quadrature point separates them, and the measurement of what it is worth grows from twenty to twenty thousand.
Reduction, and what a model is forThe product nobody had to form
The Hankel singular values are the square roots of the eigenvalues of PQ. Form that product and half of them stop existing, at a floor this site can predict from one number — and the fix is the one the least-squares field has had since its first essay, arriving in a place with no least-squares problem in it.
Reduction, and what a model is forWhy a Gramian can be truncated at all
Every method in this field rests on one fact nobody states the reason for — the eigenvalues of a Gramian fall off a cliff. The equation defining it has a rank-one right-hand side and no low-rank structure anywhere — and the answer's decay is a rational approximation problem with a closed-form rate.