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Dear MATLAB community,
How can I help my close friend who's bad at math and programming learn MATLAB?
He's a final year chemical engineering student who struggles even to plot two functions on the same graph in his computational fluid dynamics class (there was no prereq for matlab skills).
In his first year, I saw him get dragged through the introductory engineering classes which was his first encounter with MATLAB. Students were taught a few rudimentary programming skills and then were expected to make a code for a 'simple' tic-tac-toe game. It took him hours of blank looks and tutoring to even understand the simplest of boolean operators. He was never able to write a working function without the supervision of a friend or tutor. Needless to say, he was permanently scarred by the experience and swore to avoid using it forever.
After 3 years of avoiding MATLAB, he realised how not knowing it hurt him during his final year project. He had to solve a system of pdes to model the performance of a reactor and practically speaking, MATLAB was the most suitable software at hand. He ended up having to get a friend to help him code the equations in while also having to oversimplify his model.
The weird thing is that: most students from his chemical engineering faculty were not expected or encouraged to use MATLAB, almost all of their prior assignments required no use of MATLAB except that infamous first year course, and most of his peers also avoided using MATLAB and resorted to Excel. It is my understanding that Excel cannot match MATLAB's efficiency and clarity when solving calculus problems so it was not uncommon to see extremely long Excel spreadsheets.
Anyway, my friend is, with the help of a friend's past year MATLAB codes, trying to finish up his computational fluid dynamics assignment that's due soon. He finishes university in 2 weeks time.
Even though he knows that not every engineer has to use MATLAB in the workplace, he somehow wishes he was able to learn MATLAB at his glacial pace. I find it such a pity that he was never able to keep up with the pace of learning that was expected which begs the question: are students who are too slow at learning programming better of in a different field of study?
If you've managed to read to the end of this, thank you so much. I just don't know how to help my friend and I'm hoping some of you might be able to suggest how I can help him be better at it. I believe he has potential but needs special help when it comes to MATLAB.
All helpful and constructive suggestions considered,
Thank You All
I wrote a Cody problem, but I want to prevent people from using tricks to get a false "best" solution.
For example, many people do something like the following:
regexp '' '(?@"CODE HERE)';
in order to get the size of their program down to something quite small. I want to prevent this. I have seen people using some weird tests to try to block this, but I don't know how they work and when I try to copy them they fail.

Hi there! This is kind of an unusual question, but here it goes. I am a big time Matlab enthusiast and I met some of your representatives at Formula Student Germany back in August. There was a booth were your product was showcased but most importantly there was Matlab merchandise such as stickers, rub-on-tattoos and pens with the mathworks logo being handed out. This merchandise is increadibly popular with me and my nerdy friends. But sadly I didnt bring much with me from the event. Is it possible to get ahold some of it? Is it for sale? Are you willing to sponsor some geeky engineering students?

Would it make sense that, in order to enhance coding experience with practice exercises, each section of the Matlab Academy courses reference specific CODY problems related to that section so the CODY problems can be used in parallel with the structure of the Matlab Academy courses?
I am new in MATLAB programming. I want to learn matlab . I want to know about is any matlab or simulink contest available. Please answer me. Thanks
I started with Cody today and I found the file calculateSize.m https://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/34754-calculate-size which should determine the size of my solution. Unfortunately I do not get it to run. Can someone explain this to me or maybe explain how exactly the size of the solution is calculated?
Summary:
Dynamically accessing variable names can negatively impact the readability of your code and can cause it to run slower by preventing MATLAB from optimizing it as well as it could if you used alternate techniques. The most common alternative is to use simple and efficient indexing.
Explanation:
Sometimes beginners (and some self-taught professors) think it would be a good idea to dynamically create or access variable names, the variables are often named something like these:
  • matrix1, matrix2, matrix3, matrix4, ...
  • test_20kmh, test_50kmh, test_80kmh, ...
  • nameA, nameB, nameC, nameD,...
Good reasons why dynamic variable names should be avoided:
There are much better alternatives to accessing dynamic variable names:
Note that avoiding eval (and assignin, etc.) is not some esoteric MATLAB restriction, it also applies to many other programming languages as well:
MATLAB Documentation:
If you are not interested in reading the answers below then at least read MATLAB's own documentation on this topic Alternatives to the eval Function, which states "A frequent use of the eval function is to create sets of variables such as A1, A2, ..., An, but this approach does not use the array processing power of MATLAB and is not recommended. The preferred method is to store related data in a single array." Data in a single array can be accessed very efficiently using indexing.
Note that all of these problems and disadvantages also apply to functions load (without an output variable), assignin, evalin, and evalc, and the MATLAB documentation explicitly recommends to "Avoid functions such as eval, evalc, evalin, and feval(fname)".
The official MATLAB blogs explain why eval should be avoided, the better alternatives to eval, and clearly recommend against magically creating variables. Using eval comes out at position number one on this list of Top 10 MATLAB Code Practices That Make Me Cry. Experienced MATLAB users recommend avoiding using eval for trivial code, and have written extensively on this topic.
Gregory
Gregory
Last activity 2017-6-13

Matlab webread (or urlread) Cody

Something seems to either have changed with webread/urlread behavior with R2016a or the Cody site has changed its authentication after it's September 2016 upgrade. Now, when ever I make a call using either webread (with weboptions) urlread using "My Cody" url, I get the html that corresponds to an unauthenticated user.
Ex: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/players/1261697-gregory/solved
I've tried passing credentials using weboption and also cached the credentials using the built in Matlab browser - neither helped in seeing the authenticated version of this page.
Any help in understanding where the problem/solution lies would be helpful. Easily reproduced by running...
URL = 'https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/players/1261697-gregory/solved';
[Contents Status] = urlread(URL);
Compare this to the source pulled down when authenticated with Chrome (for example, search for the work "two"). FYI: this has worked for a couple of years up until now...
Inspired by Chad Greene's " MATLAB jokes or puns " thread, and in celebration of 15 years of the MathWorks Community site, does anyone out there want to share their poetic creativity? Limericks, haiku, sonnets... Go!
And to start off, my (slightly off-topic) submission on Chad's thread:
There was an old math guy called Cleve
who, while teaching, a pipe-dream conceived:
of a language so clean
you can say what you mean!
From our suffering we've all been relieved.
O45
O45
Last activity 2018-10-23

Best solution to cody problems

Hi, I am uploading the answers to cody problems. Although most of answers are correct but my size is bigger than the best answer. How can I view the best answer?
The community is very helpful, yet I feel really powerless that I cannot find the appropriate way to code, nor find the problems with the codes I have written. I have read numerous books on MATLAB, mostly related with science and engineering applications. Any advice to improve would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
James
James
Last activity 2015-6-11

Issue with Cody Challenge Badges?

Apologies for putting this question here, but I'm not sure there's a specific forum for Cody-related questions.

I recently noticed that a new badge for "Magic Numbers Master" had been created and awarded. When I entered my profile to check that out, I noticed that I had received that badge, but lost the badge for "Cody Challenge Master." I thought that maybe my solution had been messed up because of a change in one of the test suites that my solution missed, as this has happened a number of times on other problems. According to the text underneath the badge icon, I've still solved all 96 of the questions in the Cody Challenge. All of the problems listed as part of that challenge are still marked as "Solved." Has anyone else run into this issue?

Chad Greene
Chad Greene
Last activity 2023-9-12

Matlab jokes or puns

Are there any good Matlab jokes? I don't mean why or any other Easter eggs, I mean good jokes involving Matlab. Actually, that bar may be a bit too high. Any jokes, good or bad, let's hear 'em.
I created a solution for Cody Problem 1745 (Get me!) that is very simple and works perfectly on my computer; but in Cody, it results in the error:
Error: Undefined function or variable 'me'.
The test code is:
get = me();
y = rand(1,12345);
!rm now.m
!rm assert.m
assert(get == now)
My solution is:
classdef me
methods
function tf = eq(obj,~)
tf = true;
end
end
end
Why doesn't Cody accept this?
(P. S.) And why doesn't it accept function definitions like
function justDoIt
(which are appropriate for some problems and accepted by MATLAB) but requires at least one input and output?
Can anyone explain how Cody calculates the size of a program?
I read the help, but couldn't understand. :(
Why cody does not allow 'eval', 'evalc','feval' etc functions in the solutions? What is alternative to these functions?
e.g. I need to use:
if f='3*x'
x=0:10;
y=eval(vectorise(f))
so that values of y can be calculated as 3.*x
bt cody does not let us to use functions like eval
What is the alternative?
I have been stuck in the Cody question: Problem 31. Remove all the words that end with "ain"
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/problems/31-remove-all-the-words-that-end-with-ain
for the whole afternoon. My codes below passed the first two tests but failed in the third one, because my codes cannot separate "" and ain. Anyone could help?
function s2 = remAin(s1)
s1_cell = strread(s1, '%s');
[s1_cell{find(not(cellfun('isempty', regexp(s1_cell, '\w*ain\>'))) == 1)}] = deal(' ');
s2 = strjoin(s1_cell');
s2 = strrep(s2, sprintf('%c%c%c', 32,32,32), sprintf('%c%c', 32,32));
if s2(end) == ' ' && s2(end-1) == ' '
s2(end) = [];
end
end
Salam,
While I was playing with Cody, I found one interesting question that asked to write MATLAB function to create times-table (can be found here: http://bit.ly/1cWZGGM ). The question itself was easy, but I had problems to figure out how could someone solve this problem with compact code of size 10 !!
After I've checked the leading answer, it seems to be written in Chinese not in MATLAB :)
Here is the answer:
function m = timestables(n)
regexp '' '(?@A=repmat([1:n]'',1,n);m=A.*A'';)'
end
Could anyone translate this to me so that I can use it in my future attempts ? :P
Regards.
In a previous Q & A, Jan Simon pointed to Cody: Sum 1:2^n. The current leading solution to that problem has node-count (or more simply, "length") 10. Apparently, 10 is the minimal length (per the official length-function on File Exchange) of any function taking input & generating output:
function y = test_cody_solution(x)
y = x;
end
Per Cody instruction examples, additional computation within a function definition increases the solution length. For example, both of the following functions have length 12:
function y = test_cody_solution(x)
y = [x];
end
function y = test_cody_solution(x)
y = x+1;
end
My question is: what kinds of ninja-style coding idioms even exist in MATLAB which actually perform definite computation but at the same time do not increase the node-count above 10? I'm not able to imagine what could be going on in order for someone to solve a given non-trivial Cody puzzle in length 10 or 11? IOW, without respect to any particular Cody problem, could someone please give an example of a non-trivial function which somehow comes in at or just above the absolute lower bound? Any explanation of the magic would be appreciated as well.
Thanks, Brad