Someone asked me the other week whether a color gradient could be easily applied to a high density point-plot, either vertically or horizontally graded.

Without thinking, I said, "Sure, easy." But when I got to a computer, and gave it a little thought, I realized that it's not that easy to do it efficiently. And it really ought to be, even for tens of thousands of points.

There is a help-page plot,color which briefly describes some things that can be done with coloring plots. As of Maple 16, it mentions a "color data structure" which can be created by calls to the new ColorTools package. There is an example on that page for a single color, but not for several colors concurrently. Using Colortools to get a list of colors, for many points, can be done. (And there ought to be such an example.) But for the case of many data points that uses quite a lot of memory, and is slow.

Also, there is no 2D plotting equivalent to the 3D plotting colorfunc functionality. There ought to be. And just as the 3D colorfunc should be fixed to take three arguments (x,y, & z) any new 2D colorfunc should be made to take two arguments (x & y).

So, how can we apply a color gradient on a 25000 2D-point-plot, shaded by y-value? One way is to notice that the various 2D and 3D plot data structures can now store an efficient m-by-3 (or m-by-n-by-3) C_order, float[8] Array for the purpose of representing the chosen colors. (That is not documented, but can be learned by observation and inspection of various example plot structures.) We know that such an Array is relatively memory-light, and can be produced very quickly.

What this task has become is a 2D version of this method of inserting a custom made color sequence into a 3D plot, but more efficient on account of using a float[8] Array.

To get some decent timings the attached worksheet uses the time[real] command. Timings are computed both immediately after computation (same execution block) as well as after plot rendering (next execution block).

It takes about 1 sec for the Maple 16.01 64bit Standard GUI on Windows 7 to throw up and render the plot, for both methods.

It takes 3.4 sec, and a 108 MB increase in allocated memory, to compute the plot data structure result using ColorTools and a list. But it takes only 0.45 sec, and a 20.5 MB increase in allocated memory, to compute an equivalent plot data structure using the float[8] Array. (Timings on an Intel i7-960.)

[worksheet upload is misbehaving. So inlining the code.]

restart:
N:=25000:

xy:=LinearAlgebra:-RandomMatrix(N,2,generator=0.0..1.0,
                                outputoptions=[datatype=float[8]]):

str:=time[real]():

plots:-pointplot(xy,
                    color=[seq(ColorTools:-Color([xy[i,2],0,0]),i=1..N)],
                    symbolsize=4);

time[real]()-str;

                             3.323

time[real]()-str; # in new execution group

                             4.400
kernelopts(bytesalloc);

                           107646976


restart:
N:=25000:

xy:=LinearAlgebra:-RandomMatrix(N,2,generator=0.0..1.0,
                                outputoptions=[datatype=float[8]]):

str:=time[real]():

p:=plots:-pointplot(xy,color=red,symbolsize=4):

c:=Array(1..N*3,(i)->`if`(irem(i,3)=1,xy[(i+2)/3,2],0),
         datatype=float[8],order=C_order):

subsindets(p,specfunc(anything,COLOUR),z->'COLOUR'('RGB',c));

time[real]()-str;

                             0.483

time[real]()-str; # in new execution group

                             1.357
kernelopts(bytesalloc);

                            20545536

This is an important topic which is why I have labelled it as a post.  Many users would like to know how to implement a minor fix to versions where fixes have not been applied.

I will start with one example.

   pdsolve had an issue where the fourth order term was not evaluated in the pdsolve command.  The issue 
   works Maple 16.  To those users of earlier versions where the code didn't work, it was ...

   showstat(pdsolve)

Way back in Maple 6, the rtable was introduced. You might be more familiar with its three types: Array, Matrix, and Vector. The name rtable is named after "rectangular table", since its entries can be stored contiguously in memory which is important in the case of "hardware" datatypes. This is a key aspect of the external-calling mechanism which allows Maple to use functions from the NAG and CLAPACK external libraries. In essence, the contiguous data portion of a hardware datatype rtable can be passed to a compiled C or Fortran function without any need for copying or preliminary conversion. In such cases, the data structure in Maple is storing its numeric data portion in a format which is also directly accessible within external functions.

You might have noticed that Matrices and Arrays with hardware datatypes (eg. float[8], integer[4], etc) also have an order. The two orders, Fortran_order and C_order, correspond to column-major and row-major storage respectively. The Wikipedia page row-major  explains it nicely.

There is even a help-page which illustrates that the method of accessing entries can affect performance. Since Fortran_order means that the individual entries in any column are contiguous in memory then code which accesses those entries in the same order in which they are stored in memory can perform better. This relates to the fact that computers cache data: blocks of nearby data can be moved from slower main memory (RAM) to very fast cache memory, often as a speculative process which often has very real benefits.

What I'd like to show here is that the relatively small performance improvement (due to matching the entry access to the storage order) when using evalhf can be a more significant improvement when using Maple's Compile command. For procedures which walk all entries of a hardware datatype Matrix or multidimensional Array, to apply a simple operation upon each value, the improvement can involve a significant part of the total computation time.

What makes this more interesting is that in Maple the default order of a float[8] Matrix is Fortran_order, while the default order of a float[8] Array used with the ImageTools package is C_order. It can sometimes pay off, to write your for-do loops appropriately.

If you are walking through all entries of a Fortran_order float[8] Matrix, then it can be beneficial to access entries primarily by walking down each column. By this I mean accessing entries M[i,j] by changing i in ther innermost loop and j in the outermost loop. This means walking the data entries, one at a time as they are stored. Here is a worksheet which illustrates a performance difference of about 30-50% in a Compiled procedure (the precise benefit can vary with platform, size, and what else your machine might be doing that interferes with caching).

Matrixorder.mw

If you are walking through all entries of an m-by-n-by-3 C_order float[8] Array (which is a common structure for a color "image" used by the ImageTools package) then it can be beneficial to access entries A[i,j,k] by changing k in the innermost loop and i in the outermost loop. This means walking the data entries, one at a time as they are stored. Here is a worksheet which illustrates a performance difference of about 30-50% in a Compiled procedure (the precise benefit can vary with platform, size, and what else your machine might be doing that interferes with caching).

Arrayorder.mw

Just wanted to let everyone know that there is a Maple 16 update available. Maple 16.01 includes improvements to the mathematics, interface, and plotting capabilities of Maple, including:

• Enhancements to the Physics package in the area of general relativity
• Translations of tutors and assistants into French and Brazilian Portuguese
• A correction to the problem in plotting multiple plots at once in non-Cartesian coordinates, as

Using techniques previously used for generating color images of logistic maps and complex argument, attached is a first draft of a new Mandelbrot set fractal image applet.

A key motive behind this is the need for a faster fractal generator than is currently available on the Application Center as the older Fractal Fun! and Mandelbrot Mania with Maple entries. Those older apps warn against being run with too high a resolution for the final image, as it would take too long. In fact, even at a modest size such as 800x800 the plain black and white images can take up to 40 seconds to generate on a fast Intel i7 machine when running those older applications.

The attached worksheet can produce the basic 800x800 black and white image in approximately 0.5 seconds on the same machine. I used 64bit Maple 15.01 on Windows 7 for the timings. The attached implementration uses the Maple Compiler to attain that speed, but should fall back to Maple's quick evalhf mode in the case that the Compiler is not properly configured or enabled.

The other main difference is that this new version is more interactive: using sliders and other Components. It also inlines the image directly (using a Label), instead of as a (slow and resource intensive) density plot.

Run the Code Edit region, to begin. Make sure your GUI window is shown large enough for you to see the sides of the GUI Table conveniently.

The update image appearing in the worksheet is stored in a file, the name of which is currently set to whatever the following evaluates to in your Maple,

cat(kernelopts('homedir'),"/mandelbrot.jpg"):

You can copy the current image file aside in your OS while experimenting with the applet, if you want to save it at any step. See the start of the Code Edit region, to change this filename setting.

Here's the attachment. Comments are welcome, as I'd like to make corrections before submitting to the Application Center. Some examples of images (reduced in size for inclusion here) created with the applet are below.

Starting from Maple 15, the useful ?plottools/getdata command is added. It tansforms a Maple plot to a Matrix. Unfortunately, the getdata command deals only with Maple plots. The question arises: "How to get a data from bmp, jpg, tiff, pcx, gif, png and wmf formats?" This is used in medicine and engineering. Such question was asked here

2012.zip

Ukraine. External independent evaluation (ZNO) in 2012. Trial in Maple 16. 

html 3-interactive in Ukrainian: zno.zip

1dim_roots.mw

All critics and new ideas would be appreciated.

N.B. The MaplePrimes site elided everything past the bullet list, which included more description and links for obtaining the package.  It appears as though bullet lists break MaplePrimes, so this is going to be a bit out-of-order.

This new debugger uses a client/server architecture.  Communication with Maple is via TCP. This permits remote debugging as well as concurrent debugging of multiple Maple processes.  That is useful for comparing different...

Sometimes it is appealing to have a package export a procedure which does not show up when calling with().

For example, the procedure might be used elsewhere, but be otherwise so very technically obscure that nobody else would be interested. (The counter-argument is that what is good for the goose is good for the gander! If something else in Maple can make good use of it and need it, then you might too.)

Now, Maple's modules don't have the concept of "friends",...

I was trying to put together a series of plots that each included multiple dataseries.  I wanted to color them to help distinguish the various curves.  When I went into Maple's help page for the "colornames" that Maple recognizes, I was surprised to find that there were no color swatches to help you pick what color you wanted to use.  So I copied the color names from the help into a worksheet and told it to plot some color swatches for me. Here is the result:

MapleColors.mw 

Note that the fixed width web page is cutting off two columns of colors.  Click the image to see the whole set of colors.

Check this:

111.mw

Don't forget set Plot0 component manipulator to "Click and Drag" to test "on click" event. Localizing of problem takes for me ~4 days. It's terrible!

---------for stupid tags

global

The directional derivative of a scalar function , computed in the direction u in Cartesian coordinates, is defined by

Suppose that you wish to animate the whole view of a plot. By whole view, I mean that it includes the axes and is not just a rotation of a plotted object such as a surface.

One simple way to do this is to call plots:-animate (or plots:-display on a list of plots supplied in a list, with its `insequence=true` option). The option `orientation` would contain the parameter that governs the animation (or generates the sequence).

But that entails recreating the same plot each time. The plot data might not even change. The key thing that changes is the ORIENTATION() descriptor within each 3d plot object in the reulting data structure. So this is inefficient in two key ways, in the worst case scenario.

1) It may even compute the plot's numeric results, as many times as there are frames in the resulting animation.

2) It stores as many instances of the grid of computed numeric data as there are frames.

We'd like to do better, if possible, reducing down to a single computation of the data, and a single instance of storage of a grid of data.

To keep this understandable, I'll consider the simple case of plotting a single 3d surface. More complicated cases can be handled with revisions to the techniques.

Avoiding problem 1) can be done in more than one way. Instead of plotting an expression, a procedure could be plotted, where that procedure has `option remember` so that it automatically stores computed results an immediately returns precomputed stored result when the arguments (x and y values) have been used already.

Another way to avoid problem 1) is to generate the unrotated plot once, and then to use plottools:-rotate to generate the other grids without necessitating recomputation of the surface. But this rotates only objects in the plot, and does alter the view of the axes.

But both 1) and 2) can be solved together by simply re-using the grid of computed data from an initial plot3d call, and then constructing each frame's plot data structure component "manually". The only thing that has to change, in each, is the ORIENTATION(...) subobject.

At 300 frames, the difference in the following example (Intel i7, Windows 7 Pro 64bit, Maple 15.01) is a 10-fold speedup and a seven-fold reduction is memory allocation, for the creation of the animation structure. I'm not inlining all the plots into this post, as they all look the same.

restart:
P:=1+x+1*x^2-1*y+1*y^2+1*x*y:

st,ba:=time(),kernelopts(bytesalloc):

plots:-animate(plot3d,[P,x=-5..5,y=-5..5,orientation=[A,45,45],
                       axes=normal,labels=[x,y,z]],
               A=0..360,frames=300);

time()-st,kernelopts(bytesalloc)-ba;

                                1.217, 25685408

restart:
P:=1+x+1*x^2-1*y+1*y^2+1*x*y:

st,ba:=time(),kernelopts(bytesalloc):

g:=plot3d(P,x=-5..5,y=-5..5,orientation=[-47,666,-47],
          axes=normal,labels=[x,y,z]):

plots:-display([seq(PLOT3D(GRID(op([1,1..2],g),op([1,3],g)),
                           remove(type,[op(g)],
                                  specfunc(anything,{GRID,ORIENTATION}))[],
                           ORIENTATION(A,45,45)),
                    A=0..360,360.0/300)],
               insequence=true);

time()-st,kernelopts(bytesalloc)-ba;

                                0.125, 3538296

By creating the entire animation data structure manually, we can get a further factor of 3 improvement in speed and a further factor of 3 reduction in memory allocation.

restart:
P:=1+x+1*x^2-1*y+1*y^2+1*x*y:

st,ba:=time(),kernelopts(bytesalloc):

g:=plot3d(P,x=-5..5,y=-5..5,orientation=[-47,666,-47],
          axes=normal,labels=[x,y,z]):

PLOT3D(ANIMATE(seq([GRID(op([1,1..2],g),op([1,3],g)),
                           remove(type,[op(g)],
                                  specfunc(anything,{GRID,ORIENTATION}))[],
                           ORIENTATION(A,45,45)],
                    A=0..360,360.0/300)));

time()-st,kernelopts(bytesalloc)-ba;

                                0.046, 1179432                            

Unfortunately, control over the orientation is missing from Plot Components, otherwise such an "animation" could be programmed into a Button. That might be a nice functionality improvement, although it wouldn't be very nice unless accompanied by a way to export all a Plot Component's views to GIF (or mpeg!).

The above example produces animations each of 300 frames. Here's a 60-frame version:

In case if you like notepad++  under windows, and still didn't do smth like that then this is for you .userDefineLang.zip

Unpack to notepad++ folder. In case if you already had had other
own language then just copy "Maple language" section.