This deserved a bit of further explanation, due to the stupidity involved.
“Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer.” – Filipe Fortes
My code was giving an unexpected result and I was having a hard time figuring out the problem. The unexpected result was that a resampled set of 2D coordinates were not being rotated randomly. I was fortunate to be able to see this otherwise I would have never found this bug and probably would’ve propagated the error to other code projects.
I narrowed down the cause but ended up having to write some short code to check that it really did cause the error.
I was making a rotation matrix and then using it to rotate a 2D coordinate set by matrix multiplication. The angle was randomised in the loop. What could go wrong? I looked at that this:
theta = pi*enoise(1)
rotMat = {{cos(theta),-sin(theta)},{sin(theta),cos(theta)}}
and thought “two lines – pah – it can be done in one!”. Since the rotation matrix is four numbers [-1,1], I thought “I’ll just pick those numbers at random, I just want a random angle don’t I?”
rotMat = enoise(1)
Why doesn’t an alarm go off when this happens? A flashing sign saying “are you sure about that?”…
My checks showed that a single point at 1,0 after matrix multiplication with this method gives.
When it should give
And it’s so obvious when you’ve seen why. The four numbers in the rotation matrix are, of course, not independent.
I won’t make that mistake again and I’m going to try to think twice when trying to save a line of code like in the future!
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Part of a series on computers and coding.