Thursday, March 4, 2010

The "GridMatrix" technique.

The Basics
As you can see from my last posts, I will be using matrices a lot. First off what is a matrix ? It is an array of data arranged in a special fashion with each other. A single matrix may have several dimension
A matrix can have any number of dimension but it is impossibly hard to imagine more than 3. But there are applications for them still. 

A matrix is created thus:

Dim myMatrix(4, 4) as Integer

This will have created a matrix with two dimensions, each containing 5 elements ( starts at 0 ). Easy isn't it ?

The Method I use
We will then look at this piece of code here:

This is the code to make a simple 5 x 5 matrix and write the column number to the console. Note than I did not generate values inside the matrix, it is still empty. I allowed my program to follow the flow of the matrix and reflect the geometry of the matrix itself. 

I use a sweeping technique, I choose each line one by one with the first For Next loop. This will allow me to "plug" myself in a single line. After this I sweep through the columns using another For Next. Then moving unto the next line and repeating. 

Couple interesting points here.  myMatrix.getLowerBound(0) will take the lowest position of the first dimension ( in this case the dimension 0 ) and will go up from there until he encounters the upper boundary of the dimension. If I wanted to make a 3-dimension matrix I would have written 

Dim myMatrix(4, 4, 4) as integer

The output is then: 


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