From: "Ned Gulley" <gulley@mathworks.com>
Path: news.mathworks.com!newsfeed-00.mathworks.com!webcrossing
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.matlab
Subject: Re: MATLAB Programming Contest
Message-ID: <ef472c3.6@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:07:01 -0500
References: <ef472c3.1@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP> <ef472c3.2@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP> <ef472c3.3@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP> <ef472c3.4@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP> <ef472c3.5@webcrossing.raydaftYaTP>
Lines: 15
NNTP-Posting-Host: 144.212.107.82
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Xref: news.mathworks.com comp.soft-sys.matlab:381079



websiteng wrote:
> when dealing with boundary cases, do you think the
> definitions of 'deflection' and 'reflection' are a
> little bit confusing?

The boundary case you describe is indeed a little confusing.
"Physically" the beam(0,-1) would be deflected, but for the purposes
of reporting the result (and since there is nowhere for the deflected
beam to go) this situation is simply defined as a reflection. It's
sort of like saying factorial(0) = 1. It's a matter of definition.

So beam(0,-1) results in [0,-1,2].

-Ned Gulley.
The MATLAB Contest Team