Display what mldivide function (or A\b) does

I've stumbled upon a realy large system of linear equations - approximately of size . I've used the backlash operator "\" to obtain the solution which computes without any RCOND warnings.

While I'm happy with this, I'd like to know which solver is the operator actually using. I'd like to publish results from my research and it is imperative that I need to specify the solver.

Is there a way to demystify what mldivide is doing like we can do to some non-linear optimization solvers?

Answer 1

[Steven Lord]

There is a flowchart in the mldivide, \ documentation page that describes at a high level what it does to solve a system.

But if you're publishing your results, do you need to explain what it does or would showing that it gives a correct result (if x = A\b then A*x should be close to b for some definition of "close to") be sufficient?

By the way, I wouldn't consider a system of size 3^5-by-3^5 to be "really large".

3^5

ans = 243

Or did you mean 3e5?

3e5

ans = 300000

[Supreeth Sultanpur]

Yes. Thanks for the correction.

[Supreeth Sultanpur]

I've seen the flowchart and it isn't straight forward to figure out the solver.

I want the algorithm I've created to be independent of MATLAB. If I could determine the solver, the specification of the algorithm would be complete.

I've just arbitrarily tried other linear solvers provided in MATLAB, and all of them have failed to converge.