Computing tropical linear spaces

We define and study the cyclic Bergman fan of a matroid M, which is a simplicial polyhedral fan supported on the tropical linear space T(M) of M and is amenable to computational purposes. It slightly refines the nested set structure on T(M), and its rays are in bijection with flats of M which are either cyclic flats or singletons. We give a fast algorithm for calculating it, making some computational applications of tropical geometry now viable. Our C++ implementation, called TropLi, and a tool for computing vertices of Newton polytopes of A-discriminants, are both available online. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.