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The MATLAB AI Chat Playground is open to everyone!
Check it out here on the community: https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/playground
MATLAB AI Chat Playground Screenshot
I just published a blog post announcing the release.
Here's a MATLAB class I wrote that leverages the MATLAB Central Interface for MATLAB toolbox, which in turn uses the publicy available Community API. Using this class, I've created a few Favorites that show me what's going on in MATLAB Central - without having to leave MATLAB 🙂
The class has a few convenient queries:
  • Results for the last 7 days
  • Results for the last 30 days
  • Results for the current month
  • Results for today
And supporting a bunch of different content scopes:
  • All MATLAB Central
  • MATLAB Answers
  • Blogs
  • Cody
  • Contests
  • File Exchange
  • Exclude Answers content
The results are displayed in the command window (which worked best for me) and link to each post. Here's what that looks like for this command
>> CommunityFeed.thisMonth("app designer", CommunityFeed.Scope.ExcludeAnswers)
Let me know if you find this class useful and feel free to suggest changes.
New Cheat Sheet Alert!
Level up your data organization and access skills in MATLAB with our latest cheat sheet! Download the full cheat sheet on MATLAB GitHub for Students here.
Julian
Julian
Last activity 2024-2-5

Naming x-values in bar(x,y)

I know the latest version of MATLAB R2023b has this feature already, put it should be added to R2023a as well because of its simplicity and convenience.
Basically, I want to make a bar graph that lets me name each column in a basic bar graph:
y=[100 99 100 200 200 300 500 800 1000];
x=["0-4" "5-17" "18-29" "30-39" "40-49" "50-64" "65-74" "75-84" "85+"];
bar(x,y)
However, in R2023a, this isn't a feature. I think it should be added because it helps to present data and ideas more clearly and professionally, which is the purpose of a graph to begin with.
Matt J
Matt J
Last activity 2024-3-1

Implicit expansion for CAT()

Would it be a good thing to have implicit expansion enabled for cat(), horzcat(), vertcat()? There are often situations where I would like to be able to do things like this:
x=[10;20;30;40];
y=[11;12;13;14];
z=cat(3, 0,1,2);
C=[x,y,z]
with the result,
C(:,:,1) =
10 11 0
20 12 0
30 13 0
40 14 0
C(:,:,2) =
10 11 1
20 12 1
30 13 1
40 14 1
C(:,:,3) =
10 11 2
20 12 2
30 13 2
40 14 2
In the past year, we've witnessed an exponential growth of ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools. AI has quickly become a transformative force across industries, from tech giants to small startups, and even community sites like ours. For instance, Stack Overflow announced its plan to leverage AI tools to draft a question or tag content; Quora built a ChatGPT bot to answer questions; and GitHub is piloting the AI tool for personalized content.
This trend in the community landscape makes me wonder what MATLAB Central community, especially in MATLAB Answers, can do to integrate AI and enhance the community.
Share with us your ideas in the comment session. Ideally one comment per idea, so that others can vote on a secific idea or have deeper discussions about it.
We launched the Discussions area with 6 channels, based on the existing types of content we see today in the MATLAB Central community.
I'm curious which channels you are most interested in participating, or which channels are missing.
Tell us your thoughts here!
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h376W93gQq4
Chen, Rena, and I are at a community management event. It's great to be with others talking about relationships, trust, and co-creation.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson
Last activity 2023-12-27

Tricking AI vision systems

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTUnVEiO-TU
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsGEcLwjgEg
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.
https://fb.watch/njjZFdCnC1/
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
This is the 6th installment of the wish-list and bug report thread.
This topic is the follow on to the first Wish-list for MATLAB Answer sections and second MATLAB Answers Wish-list #2 (and bug reports). The third started out as New design of the forum - grey on white and the fourth and fifth also grew so large they are slow to load and navigate.
Same idea as the previous ones: one wish (or bug report) per answer, so that people can vote their wishes.
What should you post where?
Wishlist threads (#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6): bugs and feature requests for Matlab Answers
Frustation threads (#1 #2): frustations about usage and capabilities of Matlab itself
Missing feature threads (#1 #2): features that you whish Matlab would have had
Next Gen threads (#1): features that would break compatibility with previous versions, but would be nice to have
@anyone posting a new thread when the last one gets too large (about 50 answers seems a reasonable limit per thread), please update this list in all last threads. (if you don't have editing privileges, just post a comment asking someone to do the edit)
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.
This is not a question, but a point of discussion for the entire community. I am aware that every 1/2 months this theme comes out, but until this is not fixed it is totally necessary that this comes, indeed, out. And I said "fix" because Mathworks has to understand that a dark theme is not only a visual/aesthetic matter, it is a substantial part of the game. Most of the OS, GUIs, programs are actually in dark mode, and a vast majority of the users makes indeed use of a global dark mode. How much one does like it is personal, but the benefits to power savings and eye health is instead a fact. Mathworks being ignoring this for years is nothing but ridiculous. Of course it is not an easy task, but every minute of committment for it is worthy. And nope, Schemer is not helpful because it does not provide a real fix to this question.
I feel free to suggest something similar to the Spyder's dark theme, which came out like 2 years ago if I remember correctly.
Of course, my point is not being disrespectful (I am instead very respectful to the huge efforts of Mathworks for making this wonderful program run). But, form a user's point of view, the fact that not a single word has so far come out from Mathworks about a dark theme (meaning that for sure we will not see it in a timing of months) requires us to put a strong pressure on this.
Mathworks, please: it's time for a dark theme.
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:
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/comma-separated-lists.html
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/access-multiple-elements-of-a-nonscalar-struct-array.html
https://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/matlab-tips-and-tricks-exploiting-the-comma-separated-list-vectorizing-cell-array-and-structure-references.html
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)
Let's say MathWorks decides to create a MATLAB X release, which takes a big one-time breaking change that abandons back-compatibility and creates a more modern MATLAB language, ditching the unfortunate stuff that's around for historical reasons. What would you like to see in it?
I'm thinking stuff like syntax and semantics tweaks, changes to function behavior and interfaces in the standard library and Toolboxes, and so on.
(The "X" is for major version 10, like in "OS X". Matlab is still on version 9.x even though we use "R20xxa" release names now.)
What should you post where?
Wishlist threads (#1 #2 #3 #4 #5): bugs and feature requests for Matlab Answers
Frustation threads (#1 #2): frustrations about usage and capabilities of Matlab itself
Missing feature threads (#1 #2): features that you whish Matlab would have had
Next Gen threads (#1): features that would break compatibility with previous versions, but would be nice to have
@anyone posting a new thread when the last one gets too large (about 50 answers seems a reasonable limit per thread), please update this list in all last threads. (if you don't have editing privileges, just post a comment asking someone to do the edit)
Is anyone else disappointed with uifigures? It seems apparent that these will eventually replace traditional figures, but there is still so much that doesn't quite work. I've tinkered with uifigures since their introduction in release 2016a, but even in 2020a I can't reliably export a uifigure to a graphics file. Sure it works sometimes, but not if a uipanel is present. The exportgraphics command is not as powerful as the print command, leaving some graphic formats (such as *.svg and *.eps) unsupported. How do you generate graphic files of a specific size? You can't even use subplots without overriding the default AutoResizeChildren setting!
Everything with uifigures seems to be slower and less stable than the figure variant. App Designer is much better than GUIDE, but that is not exactly high praise. I would rather generate "apps" programatically across several files instead of dealing with a single-file class definition containing 1000+ lines.
Where is this transition going? MATLAB graphics are moving away from Java in favor of JavaScript, and I'm not sure that we are at all ready for that.