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Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 29 Jan 2024

Pong Wars in MATLAB

One of my colleauges, Michio, recently posted an implementation of Pong Wars in MATLAB
Making me wonder about variations. What might the resulting patterns look with differing numbers of balls? Different physics etc?
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 22 Oct 2024

Multiple AIs in the chat playground

When I want to understand a problem, I'll often use different sources. I'll read different textbooks, blog posts, research papers and ask the same question to different people. The differences in the solutions are almost always illuminating.
I feel the same way about AIs. Sometimes, I don't want to ask *THE* AI...I want to ask a bunch of them. They'll have different strengths and weaknesses..different personalities if you want to think of it that way.
I've been playing with the AI chat arena and there really is a lot of difference between the answers returned by different models. https://lmarena.ai/?arena
I think it would be great if the MATLAB Chat playgroundwere to allow the user to change which AI they were talking with.
What does everyone else think?
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 10 May 2024

spy easter egg

spy
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 17 Jan 2022

Help us help you: Post your code

Every day, thousands of people ask questions on MATLAB Answers and many of these are about their code. Questions such as “How can I make this faster?”, “Why do I get this error message?” or “Why don’t I get the answer I expect?”. There’s often one crucial thing missing though – the code in question!

Most of the people who answer questions on MATLAB Answers are volunteers from the community. They are answering your questions for fun, to learn more about MATLAB or just because they like to be helpful. This is even true for people such as me who are MathWorks members of staff. It’s not part of my role to patrol the community, looking where I can help out. I do it because I like to do it.

Make it easier to help me help you.

Imagine you’re a volunteer, looking for something interesting to answer. What kind of questions are you more likely to dig into and help an anonymous stranger figure out?

In my case, I almost always focus on problems that I can easily reproduce. I rarely know the answer to any question off the top of my head and so what I like to do is start off with the problem you are facing and use the various tools available to me such as the profiler or debugger to figure it out. This is the fun of it all for me – I almost always learn something by doing this and you get helped out as a side effect!

The easier I can reproduce your issue, the more likely I am to get started. If I can’t reproduce anything and the answer isn’t immediately obvious to me I’ll just move onto the next question. One example that demonstrates this perfectly is a case where someone’s MATLAB code was running too slowly. All of the code was available so I could run it on my machine, profile it and provide a speed-up of almost 150x.

It's not always feasible or desirable to post all of your code in which case you need to come up with a minimal, reproducible example. What’s the smallest amount of code and data you can post that I can run on my machine and see what you see? This may be more work for you but it will greatly increase your chances of receiving an answer to your question.