We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
A chopped ideal is obtained from a homogeneous ideal by considering only the generators of a fixed degree. We investigate cases in which the chopped ideal defines the same finite set of points as the original one-dimensional ideal. The complexity of computing these points from the chopped ideal is governed by the Hilbert function and regularity. We conjecture values for these invariants and prove them in many cases. We show that our conjecture is of practical relevance for symmetric tensor decomposition.
