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cartesian products?

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daren.r

25 Aug, 2020 08:04 PM

coming from a SQL background, im not sure what it's called.. is there an effective way to do a cartesian product of two lists?

example:

(x,y,z) , (1,2,3) becomes...

x1, x2, x3
y1, y2, y3
z1, z2, z3

i can do this manually now with a counter / range / shift .. but im not sure if theres something else i might be missing

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by john on 26 Aug, 2020 12:36 AM

   

   Hi Daren,

   I made a simple Cartesian Product node for you (technically a subnetwork). See zip file and two screenshots (attached).

   If you look inside the cart_prod node you will see that it's absurdly simple: all I do is concatenate the two lists (with an optional delimiter).

   But there is a subtle trick needed to make this work. If you select the node and open the MetaData dialog, then select the set 1 and set 2 ports, you will see that the range for set 1 is list while the range for set 2 is value.

   This means that the node sucks in the entire set 1 list and then fires once for each item in set 2. Each time it fires it produces concatenations (ordered pairs) of every item from set 1 with one item from set 2. The end result is a single list with all combinations.

   This is a wonderful example of the way subnetworks work. Their main purpose is not so much to encapsulate nodes, but rather to choreograph the flow of data. This takes a little getting used to, but is very powerful.

   I provide two examples. You can feed the node strings or numbers, but both lists will be treated as strings. The first case shows the Cartesian Product of {x,y,z} with {1,2,3,4} with no delimiter. The second case joins two different sets of 10 random numbers and uses a comma delimiter. Although the output is a list of strings, you can treat them a points (comma-separated pairs of values) and use that to plot an arrangement of 100 dots.

   Thanks for an interesting question. Keep them coming!

   John

   • cart_prod_example1.png 440 KB
   • cart_prod_example2.png 271 KB
   • Cartesian_Product.zip 949 Bytes
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2. 2 Posted by daren.r on 29 Sep, 2020 03:19 AM

   

   Thank you!

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3. daren.r closed this discussion on 23 Feb, 2023 01:58 AM.