Name: 1.1 What is a Vector? - The Nature of Code
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T19:00:57.000Z
Duration: 15 min 43 s
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at what it means to use the concept of a vector with p5.js.

Now, if you watch some of the videos in the introduction

section, one of the examples I went through is a random walk.

In this example, I have two variables, x and y.

Together they make up a position in the canvas,

and then every cycle through draw, every frame of animation,

and move it either to the right, the left, up, or down.

So the concept of a vector is something you're probably

without realizing it, but maybe you're not actually

That's really where I'm leading here, but let's zoom back out

So first, let me use another term for you, scalar.

So scalar might sound like some scary math terminology that

seems unfamiliar to you, but this is actually

something you have definitely been using all along.

For example, here is an example of a scalar value, 6.

Examples of things that are scalar quantities

Maybe the surface area of this beautiful coding train

Fahrenheit or Celsius or Kelvin, that's a scalar quantity.

How far away in the world are you from me right now.

Anything that you can measure as a single magnitude,

A vector, however, has not just magnitude, but also direction.

is vectors can exist in many kinds of dimensional spaces.

Two dimensional spaces, three dimensional space,

four dimensional, five dimensional, six dimensional,

and you might have heard me say the term vector in other videos

that I've made maybe about machine learning and data,

but what I'm going to do in this series is constrain myself,

This is because I am working with them in a p5.js canvas,

and that happens to be a two dimensional space.

You might choose, and I might do some examples that

and in fact, p5 vectors do support three dimensions.

and trying to explain all of this and look at the math

The typical way a vector is represented is by an arrow.

So let me return back to this random walk example,

I had an x and a y, and an x and y is moving randomly,

How could I think of that x and y as a vector.

They represent a point in space, two dimensional space, x and y.

together as a vector that provides instructions

for how to get from the origin point, 0, 0, all the way

So this is the idea of thinking in terms of vectors.

This entity, this vector has both a magnitude,

It is the length of this arrow, and a direction.

and I could think of that in different ways,

So I could think of a vector as the length of an arrow,

as well as what direction it's pointing as an angle

Let me take a minute to redo this diagram in a more

are a little strange in that the origin is in the top left

But a more typical Cartesian plane, a two dimensional plane,

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1.1 What is a Vector? - The Nature of Code

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