In his 1981 Fundamental Theorem of Algebra paper Steve Smale initiated the
complexity theory of finding a solution of polynomial equations of one complex
variable by a variant of Newton's method. In this paper we reconsider his
algorithm in the light of work done in the intervening years. Our main theorem
raises more problems than it solves.
Given a C^1 path of systems of homogeneous polynomial equations f_t, t in
[a,b] and an approximation x_a to a zero zeta_a of the initial system f_a, we
show how to adaptively choose the step size for a Newton based homotopy method
so that we approximate the lifted path (f_t,zeta_t) in the space of (problems,
solutions) pairs.
The total number of Newton iterations is bounded in terms of the length of
the lifted path in the condition metric.