Matrix Multiplication, A Novella: Chapter 2

Well, your days as an event planner are over. There was a lot of blood at Bacchanal S, and the police are looking for you. So you ditch town, fly to the North Pole, and find a job in Santa’s Behavior Psychology lab.

“Naughty” and “Nice” aren’t simple concepts, and Santa needs experts to determine which child is which. The lab tracks each child’s actions, and each action is associated with a naughtiness and niceness “score”… hey, does this look familiar to you?

matrices-1

Good lord, this is just like the spreadsheets you used as an event planner!

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Okay, you just crushed some naughty/nice scores — but there’s more. There’s another spreadsheet that determines what Christmas presents a child gets for a given amount of naughtiness or niceness:

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You can handle this! You have to take that naughtiness/niceness-score-per-child matrix you just generated, and multiply it by this matrix…

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Wait. That can’t be right. Your math is correct, but those numbers are way too huge. There must be a logic error somewhere. Shoot, how does this matrix multiplication thing work, again?

  • Your first matrix is a spreadsheet representing amount of Y per X, for some set of items X and Y. For instance:
    • “Number of [tables/chairs/balloons] I need to rent per event, for [my 5 upcoming events]” (Y = items to rent, X = events to rent items for)
    • “Number of [punches/hugs/kisses] performed per child, for [every child Santa tracks]” (Y = actions children perform, X = children whose actions Santa tracks)
  • Your second matrix is a spreadsheet representing the amount of Z per Y. For instance:
    • “Price charged by [Vendor1/Vendor2/Vendor3], for each [table/chair/balloon]” (Z = vendor prices, Y = items to rent)
    • “How many [naughtiness/niceness points] you get, for each [punch/hug/kiss]” (Z = personality points, Y = actions children perform)
  • By multiplying the two matrices, you go from amount of Y per X to amount of Z per X
    • “I know how many [tables/chairs/balloons] each event requires, and I know how much [Vendor 1/Vendor 2/Vendor 3] charges to rent an individual [table/chair/balloon], so how much would it cost to use [Vendor 1/Vendor 2/Vendor 3] for each event?”
    • “I know how many [punches/hugs/kisses] each child performed, and I know how [naughty/nice] it is to perform an individual [punch/hug/kiss], so how [naughty/nice] has each child been?”

Now, let’s see what went wrong when you tried going from naughtiness/niceness-score-per-child to presents-per-child:

matrices-5

Look at that! These units are all wrong. So what are the right units?

Well, we know that matrix multiplication means “amount of Y per X * amount of Z per Y = Amount of Z per X“. We have the matrix [naughtiness/niceness score] per [each child Santa tracks], and we want to end up with the matrix [amount of coal/candy] per [each child Santa tracks]. So…

  • X = [each child Santa tracks]
  • Y = [naughtiness/niceness score]
  • Z = [amount of coal/candy]

Therefore, we want our second matrix, amount of Z per Y, to be [amount of coal/candy] per [naughtiness/niceness score]! Then,

matrices-6-1

So we want the amount of coal per naughtiness point, not the amount of naughtiness points per coal — we inverted the units, is all. In order to invert our matrix back to the correct position, we have to flip the rows and columns (this is called a transpose) and invert the numbers to match. And now we get:

matrices-6

Nice! You just solved what presents each kid is getting! You LITERALLY saved Christmas.

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