the competition's expm vs ours

[Marco Caliari]

> Did you also try the m-file? How does it compare?
> Since the whole computation is based on high-level operations like
> matrix multiplication, solving, etc, it's an ideal candidate for an
> m-file function, provided we can do the elementary operations
> efficiently.

m-file without the trace reduction and balancing steps:

Octave 3.0.3 (ATLAS 3.8.2): 4.1 seconds
Matlab 7.6.0: 2.2 seconds

Marco