🗑️ 🧵 Maid Research: Understand shapes in higher dimensions to think about arrays more

Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 09:21:02 UTC No. 16305655

For the purpose of this discussion, I don't care about jagged arrays so answers don't have to work for or care about jagged array.

If you have a 1D array, it looks like a line

1 2 3 4

You can imagine rotating it left

2 3 4 1

Rotating it right:

4 1 2 3

If you think about 2D array, you can imagine square or a rectangle

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

You now have an extra direction to rotate in. It is easy to imaging how to rotate any column up or down, or any row left or right.

Now you can think about a box shaped array. You get another direction to slide in. Still easy to imagine it.

Now add another dimension? What even is this shape? I can't imagine it. The best I can do is think of a box that has some sort of state that changes with time.

How do I "slide" the time box?

What if I add more dimensions?

How do I slide a 256 dimension array (assuming I can get Java to stop crying about code too large error?)

How are these higher dimension shapes and arrays imagined or manipulated?

>tl;dr: I need to know how to think about slide operations for arrays with an arbitrary number of dimensions. If nobody tells me how to do this I will make my own solution and give it a maid name