Odd Things That Should Have Their Own Class

[Pacman928]

at school, math was over and kelsey was dissing matrices.  we both agreed that they should be in a different class along with a bunch of other stuff.  what do you guys think?

[Delling]

Matrices definitely belong in math class. They are a specialised subject matter for solving linear equations.

In fact, I had to use them today to solve a system of Kirchoff's equations for my CS hwk. There's a lot of things you can do with matrices that end up hiding their more useful aspects. For instance, you can rewrite a lot of relativity in matrix form or you could spend your time doing Gaussian eliminations for arbitrary and ambiguous matrices that the book feeds you.

Ultimately, matrices offer an important shorthand, but in real life you'll usually end up using whatever structure is most familiar to you. In that sense, it's best to accumulate as many nice accomodating mathematical structures as you can so as to make things easier later.


...so... what else do you think doesn't belong?

[Yonkey]

Well, I don't know about matrices, but The Matrix trilogy should definitely be in a class of its own.

Actually, I find matrices to be pretty lame myself, but they're used quite a bit with 3D graphics and animations.  They're handy when you need to solve multiple equations with multiple unknowns that are all related. 

For example, if there were three cool features in our game and I couldn't decide which one should have highest priority, I could turn that into a 3 by N matrix that contains all desirable qualities.  If I then performed Gauss-Jordan elimination on them, I'd know the exact priority of each feature.  Usually, I just do all that in my head since it's faster than writing it all out. 

You can also do it in reverse, which is how I take someone's massive blob of feedback and turn it into specific and individual issues or non-issues.  Again, it's much quicker to do in your head than on paper.