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Image Analyst
Image Analyst
Last activity on 16 Oct 2023

Caution. This is MATLAB.
MATLAB is the best programming language
Image Analyst
Image Analyst
Last activity on 16 Oct 2023

I love the smell of debugged MATLAB code in the morning. Smells like...Victory!
Shore
Shore
Last activity on 16 Oct 2023

Halloween Analysis of Many Aspects of Halloween Headquarters and Effects on USA
(Note to Chistopher: I used a simple ESP8266 generating random numbers for fields 1 thru 7, (0 to 100, 4000, 127, 30, 45, 200,000, 50,000) and 0 to 1 for field 8. And a couple of real sensor inputs.
This person used computer version to build a keyboard input, and used standard flag semaphore for the positions.
Flag semaphore is used mostly by sailors to be able to communicate optically over a distance; it does not need anything more than make-shift flags (but binoculars or telescopes can help.) Trained users can go faster than you might guess.
Chen, Rena, and I are at a community management event. It's great to be with others talking about relationships, trust, and co-creation.
Chen Lin
Chen Lin
Last activity on 16 Oct 2023

I'm in a community conference in Boston today and see what snacks we get! The organizer said it's a coincidence, but it's definitly a good idea to have them in our MathWorks community meetings.
A research team found a way to trick a number of AI systems by injecting carefully placed nonsense -- for example being able able to beat DeepMind's Go game.
This video discusses the "Cody" bridge, which is a pedestrian bridge over a canal that has been designed to move up and out of the way when ships need to travel through. The mathematics of the bridge movement are discussed and diagrammed. It is unique and educational.
Recently developed: a "microscope" based on touch and stereo vision.
Using touch removes the possibility of optical confusion -- for example, black on touch is only due to shape, not due to the possibility that the object has a black patch.
Sorry, you might need a Facebook account to watch the video.
Image Analyst
Image Analyst
Last activity on 3 Oct 2023

(Sorry - it should be 2023b by now.)
Mike Croucher
Mike Croucher
Last activity on 10 May 2024

Calling all students! New to MATLAB or need helpful resources? Check out our MATLAB GitHub for Students repository! Find MATLAB examples, videos, cheat sheets, and more!
Visit the repository here: MATLAB GitHub for Students
To solve the puzzle, first unscramble each of the words on the left. Then rearrange the letters in the yellow shaded boxes to complete the sentence on the right.
If you enjoyed this puzzle let me know with a like or in the comments below and I'll post more of them. Please don't post your answer, or any hints, and spoil it for those who come across this puzzle after you!! If you want to check your answer, you can messge me your guess through the link on my profile card (click on my name, Rena Berman, above and then on the envelope icon in the top right corner of the profile card that appears).
I've now seen linear programming questions pop up on Answers recently, with some common failure modes for linprog that people seem not to understand.
One basic failure mode is an infeasible problem. What does this mean, and can it be resolved?
The most common failure mode seems to be a unbounded problem. What does this mean? How can it be avoided/solved/fixed? Is there some direction I can move where the objective obviously grows without bounds towards +/- inf?
Finally, I also see questions where someone wants the tool to produce all possible solutions.
A truly good exposition about linear programming would probably result in a complete course on the subject, and Aswers is limited in how much I can write (plus I'll only have a finite amount of energy to keep writing.) I'll try to answer each sub-question as separate answers, but if someone else would like to offer their own take, feel free to do so as an answer, since it has been many years for me since I learned linear programming.
Introduction
Comma-separated lists are really very simple. You use them all the time. Here is one:
a,b,c,d
That is a comma-separated list containing four variables, the variables a, b, c, and d. Every time you write a list separated by commas then you are writing a comma-separated list. Most commonly you would write a comma-separated list as inputs when calling a function:
fun(a,b,c,d)
or as arguments to the concatenation operator or cell construction operator:
[a,b,c,d]
{a,b,c,d}
or as function outputs:
[a,b,c,d] = fun();
It is very important to understand that in general a comma-separated list is NOT one variable (but it could be). However, sometimes it is useful to create a comma-separated list from one variable (or define one variable from a comma-separated list), and MATLAB has several ways of doing this from various container array types:
1) from a field of a structure array using dot-indexing:
struct_array.field % all elements
struct_array(idx).field % selected elements
2) from a cell array using curly-braces:
cell_array{:} % all elements
cell_array{idx} % selected elements
3) from a string array using curly-braces:
string_array{:} % all elements
string_array{idx} % selected elements
Note that in all cases, the comma-separated list consists of the content of the container array, not subsets (or "slices") of the container array itself (use parentheses to "slice" any array). In other words, they will be equivalent to writing this comma-separated list of the container array content:
content1, content2, content3, .. , contentN
and will return as many content arrays as the original container array has elements (or that you select using indexing, in the requested order). A comma-separated list of one element is just one array, but in general there can be any number of separate arrays in the comma-separated list (zero, one, two, three, four, or more). Here is an example showing that a comma-separated list generated from the content of a cell array is the same as a comma-separated list written explicitly:
>> C = {1,0,Inf};
>> C{:}
ans =
1
ans =
0
ans =
Inf
>> 1,0,Inf
ans =
1
ans =
0
ans =
Inf
How to Use Comma-Separated Lists
Function Inputs: Remember that every time you call a function with multiple input arguments you are using a comma-separated list:
fun(a,b,c,d)
and this is exactly why they are useful: because you can specify the arguments for a function or operator without knowing anything about the arguments (even how many there are). Using the example cell array from above:
>> vertcat(C{:})
ans =
1
0
Inf
which, as we should know by now, is exactly equivalent to writing the same comma-separated list directly into the function call:
>> vertcat(1,0,Inf)
ans =
1
0
Inf
How can we use this? Commonly these are used to generate vectors of values from a structure or cell array, e.g. to concatenate the filenames which are in the output structure of dir:
S = dir(..);
F = {S.name}
which is simply equivalent to
F = {S(1).name, S(2).name, S(3).name, .. , S(end).name}
Or, consider a function with multiple optional input arguments:
opt = {'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter',',', 'CollectOutputs',true);
fid = fopen(..);
C = textscan(fid,'%f%f',opt{:});
fclose(fid);
Note how we can pass the optional arguments as a comma-separated list. Remember how a comma-separated list is equivalent to writing var1,var2,var3,..., then the above example is really just this:
C = textscan(fid,'%f%f', 'HeaderLines',2, 'Delimiter',',', 'CollectOutputs',true)
with the added advantage that we can specify all of the optional arguments elsewhere and handle them as one cell array (e.g. as a function input, or at the top of the file). Or we could select which options we want simply by using indexing on that cell array. Note that varargin and varargout can also be useful here.
Function Outputs: In much the same way that the input arguments can be specified, so can an arbitrary number of output arguments. This is commonly used for functions which return a variable number of output arguments, specifically ind2sub and gradient and ndgrid. For example we can easily get all outputs of ndgrid, for any number of inputs (in this example three inputs and three outputs, determined by the number of elements in the cell array):
C = {1:3,4:7,8:9};
[C{:}] = ndgrid(C{:});
which is thus equivalent to:
[C{1},C{2},C{3}] = ndgrid(C{1},C{2},C{3});
Further Topics:
MATLAB documentation:
Click on these links to jump to relevant comments below:
Dynamic Indexing (indexing into arrays with arbitrary numbers of dimensions)
Nested Structures (why you get an error trying to index into a comma-separated list)
Summary
Just remember that in general a comma-separated list is not one variable (although they can be), and that they are exactly what they say: a list (of arrays) separated with commas. You use them all the time without even realizing it, every time you write this:
fun(a,b,c,d)