You can make a new class inheriting from Symbol
and change its behaviour on multiplication (__mul__
) to the desired one.
To make this any useful, you need a canonic ordering anyway, which should be the same as SymPy’s (which at a quick glance appears to be by name, i.e., Symbol.name
) to avoid problems.
from sympy import Symbol, S
class AnticomSym(Symbol):
def __new__(cls,*args,**kwargs):
return super().__new__(cls,*args,**kwargs,commutative=False)
def __mul__(self,other):
if isinstance(other,AnticomSym):
if other==self:
return S.Zero
elif other.name<self.name:
return -Symbol.__mul__(other,self)
return super().__mul__(other)
def __pow__(self,exponent):
if exponent>=2:
return S.Zero
else:
return super().__pow__(exponent)
x = AnticomSym("x")
y = AnticomSym("y")
assert y*x == -x*y
assert y*y == 0
assert y**2 == 0
assert y**1 == y
assert ((x+y)**2).expand() == 0
assert x*y-y*x == 2*x*y
Now, this still does not resolve complex products such as x*y*x*y
correctly.
For this, we can write a function that sorts an arbitrary product (using bubble sort):
from sympy import Mul
def sort_product(product):
while True:
if not isinstance(product,Mul):
return product
arglist = list(product.args)
i = 0
while i < len(arglist)-1:
slice_prod = arglist[i]*arglist[i+1]
is_mul = isinstance(slice_prod,Mul)
arglist[i:i+2] = slice_prod.args if is_mul else [slice_prod]
i += 1
new_product = Mul(*arglist)
if product == new_product:
return new_product
product = new_product
z = AnticomSym("z")
assert sort_product(y*(-x)) == x*y
assert sort_product(x*y*x*y) == 0
assert sort_product(z*y*x) == -x*y*z
Finally, we can write a function that sorts all products within an expression by iterating through the expression tree and applying sort_product
to every product it encounters:
def sort_products(expr):
if expr.is_Atom:
return expr
else:
simplified_args = (sort_products(arg) for arg in expr.args)
if isinstance(expr,Mul):
return sort_product(Mul(*simplified_args))
else:
return expr.func(*simplified_args)
from sympy import exp
assert sort_products(exp(y*(-x))) == exp(x*y)
assert sort_products(exp(x*y*x*y)-exp(z*y*z*x)) == 0
assert sort_products(exp(z*y*x)) == exp(-x*y*z)
Note that I may still not have accounted for every eventuality.