Fast and Robust Smallest Enclosing Balls

I describe a C++ program for computing the smallest enclosing ball of a point set in d-dimensional space, using floating-point arithmetic only. The program is very fast for d ≤ 20, robust and simple (about 300 lines of code, excluding prototype definitions). Its new features are a pivoting approach resembling the simplex method for linear programming, and a robust update scheme for intermediate solutions. The program with complete documentation following the literate programming paradigm [3] is available on the Web.1