Turning to a Heading with an MPU-9150

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Morten Kromberg

As the odour of fried electronics dissipates in the air, I’m unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to write this blog post a day or two earlier than planned. The on-board compass was exhibiting significant deviation, so I consulted my nephew Thorbjørn Christensen at DTU-Space. Thorbjørn makes a living designing magnetometers for space agencies around the world, and he suggested I use a ribbon cable to move the IMU away from the bot as a first step towards understanding the issue. He did warn me to be very careful when attaching it. I still don’t understand what I did wrong, but the evidence that I screwed up is pretty definitive: there are burn marks around every single connector and the IMU chip looks a bit soft in the middle. Most importantly, it no longer reports for duty on the Raspberry Pi’s I2C bus!

A fried IMU-9150 (click to enlarge)

The good news (apart from the fact that the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino and all other ‘bot components seem to have survived) is perhaps that, since I cannot play with the compass until I have a replacement, I found the time to write about where I am at the moment…and take some time out to work on my presentations for Dyalog ’14 (for those who managed to register before the user meeting in Eastbourne sold out, I still hope to do a ‘bot presentation on the evening of Tuesday September 23rd).

Introducing the MPU-9150

For the last few weeks, I have been using my “bot time” to play with the MPU-9150 breakout board that is attached to our ‘bot. The MPU-9150 is more or less identical to the 6050 that we were using earlier this summer to make gyro-controlled turns but also includes a magnetic compass, which will allow us to know the direction that we are heading in – making it a 9 degree of freedom inertial measurement unit, or “9-dof IMU” (9 = 3 gyro axes + 3 accelerometer axes + 3 compass axes).

RTIMULib

I was extremely happy to discover that Richard Barnett had shared his RTIMULib on GitHub. RTIMULib is a Linux library that produces “Kalman-filtered quaternion or Euler angle pose data” based on data from a 9-dof IMU. Jay Foad at Dyalog was quickly able to provide me with a couple of additional C functions designed to be easy to call from Dyalog APL. Jay’s fork of RTIMULib is also available on GitHub. Since we can assume that we are driving on a flat surface, I have just been using two items from the wealth of information provided by this library: the current rate of rotation and the current compass direction – in both cases around the vertical (or “z”) axis.

My First Compass-Controlled Rotation

Due to the fried IMU, I am unable to post a video recording; fortunately, at the moment where I toasted the chip, the Dyalog session output still contained output data from the last run of the function I am working on, which aims to provide smooth rotation to a selected compass heading. In the chart below, the red line tracks the speed of rotation and shows that the “smooth” part still needs work – the speed oscillates quite violently between 60 and 150 degrees per second. The blue line shows the number of degrees that the ‘bot still needs to turn to reach the desired heading. The dotted red line is slightly mislabeled: rather than acceleration, it actually shows the power applied to the motors via a digital-to-analog converter that accepts values between 0 and 255, producing between 0 and 5v of voltage for the DC motors:

Commentary:

From 0 to 0.4 seconds, we slowly increase power until we detect that rotation has started. We note the power setting required to start rotation.
0.4 to 0.7 (ish), we detect acceleration and hold the throttle steady (increasing it very slightly a couple of times when acceleration appears to stop).
0.7 to 1.1 seconds, cruise mode: whenever speed is above the target of 100 degrees/sec, we idle. When speed is below 100, we re-apply power at a level that was sufficient to start the rotation.
1.1 to 1.4 seconds: We are less than 30 degrees from target, and the target velocity and thus power is reduced proportional to the remaining distance (at 15 degrees, we are down to 50 deg/sec)
1.4 to 1.6 seconds: We detect that we rotated too far, and slam on the brakes, coming to a stop about 10 degrees from target.
1.6 to 2.3 seconds: since we are less than 10 degrees from target, we enter “step” mode, giving very brief bursts of power at “start rotation” level, idling, and watching the heading until we reach the goal.
2.4 seconds: We count the bursts and, after 10, we double the power setting to avoid getting bogged down (you cannot see the bursts in the chart, it only records the power level used for each one). A little more patience would have been good, this probably means we overshot by a bit.

The “Heading” Function

Achieving anything resembling smooth movement is still some way away, mostly due to the fact that motor response to a given input voltage varies enormously from motor to motor and between different applications to the same motor. The strategy described above is implemented by a function named “Heading”, which can be found in the file mpu9150.dyalog in the APLBot folder on GitHub. An obvious improvement would be to have the robot self-calibrate itself somehow and add a model of how fast rotation speeds up and slows down (based on, and constantly adjusted with, observed data), in order to dampen the oscillations. I intend to return to this when I have a new IMU (and my other user meeting presentations are under control).

This has turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined: suggestions are very welcome – please leave comments if you have a good idea!

Isolated Mandelbrot Set Explorer

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Brian Becker

It amazes me that an equation so simple can produce images so beautiful and complex. I was first introduced to the Mandelbrot set by the August 1985 issue of Scientific American. Wikipedia says “The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers ‘c’ for which the sequence ( c , c² + c , (c²+c)² + c , ((c²+c)²+c)² + c , (((c²+c)²+c)²+c)² + c , …) does not approach infinity.” This means that in the images below, the areas in black are points in the Mandelbrot set and the other point colors are determined by how quickly that point “zooms” off towards infinity. The links above give a deeper discussion on the Mandelbrot set – for this post I’d like to focus on how I was able to speed my Mandelbrot set explorer up using isolates.

I find I learn things more easily through application than abstraction. In 2006 I wanted to learn more about the built-in GUI features of Dyalog for Windows and the application I chose was a Mandelbrot set explorer. While the basic algorithm for calculating a point in the Mandelbrot set is fairly simple, a 640×480 pixel image could involve over 75 million calculations. As new versions of Dyalog are released, I try to experiment with any applicable new features and possibly incorporate them into the explorer. For instance, when complex numbers were introduced in Dyalog, I modified the explorer to use them.

Dyalog v14.0 introduced a prototype of a parallel computing feature called isolates that may one day be integrated into the interpreter. Isolates behave much like namespaces except that they run in their own process with their own copy of the interpreter. Each process can run on a separate processor, greatly improving performance. You can even set up isolate servers on other machines.

Mandelbrot set calculations are ideal candidates for parallelization as:

they’re CPU intensive
each pixel can be calculated independently of others
there are no side effects and no state to maintain

The core calculation is shown below. It takes the real and imaginary parameters for the top left corner, the height and width of the image and the increment along each dimension and uses those parameters to build a set of co-ordinates, then iterates to see how quickly each co-ordinate “escapes” the Mandelbrot set.

 ∇ r←real buildset_core imaginary;height;i_incr;top;width;r_incr;left;set;coord;inds;cnt;escaped
  ⍝ Calculate new Mandelbrot set - remember using origin 0 (⎕IO←0)
  ⍝ real and imaginary are the parameters of the space to calculate
  ⍝       real            imaginary
  ⍝ [0]   width           height            of the image
  ⍝ [1]   increment size  increment size    along each axis
  ⍝ [2]   top             left              coordinates

   (height i_incr top)←imaginary            ⍝ split imaginary argument parameters
   (width r_incr left)←real                 ⍝ split real argument parameters
   set←coord←,(0J1×top+i_incr×⍳height)∘.+(left+r_incr×⍳width) ⍝ create all points in the image
   inds←⍳≢r←(≢coord)⍴0                      ⍝ initialize the result and create vector of indices
   :For cnt :In 1↓⍳256                      ⍝ loop up to 255 times (the size of our color palette)
       escaped←4<coord×+coord               ⍝ mark those that have escaped the Mandelbrot set
       r[escaped/inds]←cnt                  ⍝ set their index in the color palette
       (inds coord)←(~escaped)∘/¨inds coord ⍝ keep those that have not yet escaped
       :If 0∊⍴inds ⋄ :Leave ⋄ :EndIf        ⍝ anything left to do?
       coord←set[inds]+×⍨coord              ⍝ the core Mandelbrot computation... z←(z*2)+c
   :EndFor
   r←(height,width)⍴r                       ⍝ reshape to image size
 ∇

So, what’s involved in using isolates to parallelize the explorer? As it turns out, not much! First I )COPYed the isolate namespace from the isolate workspace distributed with Dyalog v14.0. I wanted to be able to select the number of processors to use, so I added a line to my init function to query how many processors are available:

 processors←1111⌶⍬ ⍝ query number of processors

Next I wrote a small function to initialize isolates for as many processors as were selected (2 or more). Notice that when creating the isolates, I copy buildset_core (from above) into each one:

 ∇ init_isolates processors
  ⍝ called upon initialization, or whenever user changes number of processors to use
   f.isomsg.Visible←1    ⍝ turn form's "Isolates initializing" message on
   {}isolate.Reset''     ⍝ reset the isolates
   {}isolate.Config'processors'processors ⍝ set the number of processors
   :If processors>1      ⍝ if using more than one processor
       ⍝ create the isolates, populating each one with buildset_core
       isolates←isolate.New¨processors⍴⎕NS'buildset_core'
   :EndIf
   f.isomsg.Visible←0    ⍝ turn the form message off
 ∇

Finally, I wrote a routine to share the work between the selected number of processors and assemble the results back together.

 ∇ r←size buildset rect;top;bottom;left;right;width;height;vert;horz;rows;incr;imaginary;real
  ⍝ Build new Mandelbrot Set using isolates if specified
  ⍝ rect is the top, bottom, left, and right
  ⍝ size is the height and width of the image
   (top bottom left right)←rect
   (height width)←size
   vert←bottom-top                             ⍝ vertical dimension
   horz←right-left                             ⍝ horizontal dimension
   rows←processors{¯2-/⌈⍵,⍨(⍳⍺)×⍵÷⍺}height     ⍝ divide image among processors (height=+/rows)
   incr←vert÷height                            ⍝ vertical increment
   imaginary←↓rows,incr,⍪top+incr×¯1↓0,+\rows  ⍝ imaginary arguments to buildset_core
   real←width,(horz÷width),left                ⍝ real arguments to buildset_core
   :If processors=1                            ⍝ if not using isolates
       r←real buildset_core⊃imaginary          ⍝ build the image here
   :Else
       r←⊃⍪/(⊂real)isolates.buildset_core imaginary ⍝ otherwise let the isolates to it
   :EndIf
 ∇

The images below depicts what happens with 4 processors. Each processor builds a slice of the image and the main task assembles them together.

So, how much faster is it? Did my 8 processor Intel Core i7 speed things up by a factor of 8? No, but depending on where in the Mandelbrot set you explore, the speed is generally increased by at least a factor of 2 and sometimes as high as 5 or 6. I thought about why this might be and have a couple of ideas…

There’s overhead to receive and assemble the results from each isolate.
The overall time will be the maximum of the individual times; if one slice is in an area that requires more iterations, then the main task needs to wait for those results, even if the other slices have already finished. I could possibly show this by updating the individual slices as they become available. Maybe next time 🙂

What impressed me was that I could speed up my application significantly with about 20 lines of code and maybe an hour’s effort – most of which was spent tinkering to learn isolates. You can download the Mandelbrot set explorer from my GitHub repository.

Making Controlled Turns with the DyaBot

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Morten Kromberg

This blog originally started when I took delivery of the DyaBot, a Raspberry Pi and Arduino based variant of the C3Pi running Dyalog v13.2. The architecture of the ‘bot and instructions for building your own inexpensive robot can all be found in blog entries from April to July of last year.

The downside of only using inexpensive components is that some of them are not very precise. The worst problem we face is that the amount of wheel movement generated by the application of a particular power level varies from one motor to the next, and indeed from moment to moment. Trying to drive a specific distance in a straight line, or make an exact 90 degree turn regardless of the surface that the ‘bot is standing on, are impossible tasks with the original Dyabot. You can have a lot of fun, as I hope the early posts demonstrate, but we have higher ambitions!

Our next task is to add motion sensors to the DyaBot, with a goal of being able to measure actual motion with sufficient accuracy to maintain our heading while driving straight ahead – and to make exact turns to new headings, like the 90-degree turn made in this video (the ‘bot has been placed on a Persian carpet to provide a background containing right angles):

Introducing the MPU-6050

For some time we have had an MPU-6050, which has 3-axis rotation and acceleration sensors, attached to our I2C bus, but haven’t been able to use it. About ten days ago (sorry, I took a few days off last week), @RomillyC came to visit us in Bramley to help me read some Python code that was written for this device. The current acceleration or rotation on each axis is constantly available as a register and can be queried via I2C. Translated into APL, the code to read the current rate of rotation around the vertical axis is:

 ∇ r←z_gyro_reading ⍝ current z-axis rotation in degrees
   r←(read_word_2c 70)÷131 ⍝ Read register #70 and scale to deg/sec
 ∇

 ∇ r←read_word_2c n;zz
   r←I2 256⊥read_byte_2c¨n+0 1               ⍝ Read 2 registers and make signed I2
 ∇

 ∇ r←read_byte_2c n;z
   z←#.I2C.WriteArray i2c_address (1,n)0     ⍝ Write register address
   r←2 2⊃#.I2C.ReadArray i2c_address (1 0)1  ⍝ Read input
 ∇

 I2←{⍵>32767:1-65535-⍵ ⋄ ⍵} ⍝ 16-bit 2's complement to signed

Integrating to Track Attitude

Reading the register directly gives us the instantaneous rate of rotation. If we want to track the attitude, we need to integrate the rates over time. The next layer of functions allows us to reset the attitude and perform very primitive integration by multiplying the current rotation with the elapsed time since the last measurement:

∇ r←z_gyro_reset            ⍝ Reset Gyro Integration
  z_gyro_time←now           ⍝ current time in ms
  z_gyro_posn←0             ⍝ current rotation is 0
∇

∇ r←z_gyro;t;delta          ⍝ Integrated gyro rotation
  t←now                     ⍝ current time in ms
  delta←0.001×t-z_gyro_time ⍝ elapsed time in seconds
  r←z_gyro_posn←z_gyro_posn+delta×z_gyro_reading+z_gyro_offset
  z_gyro_time←t             ⍝ last time
∇

We can now write a function to rotate through a given number of degrees (assuming that the gyro has just been reset): we set the wheels in motion, monitor the integrated angle until we are nearly there, then shut off the engines. We continue logging the angles for a brief moment to monitor the deceleration. The function returns a two-column matrix containing the “log” of rotation angles and timestamps:

    ∇ log←rotate angle;bot;i;t
     
      log←0 2⍴0 ⍝ Angle, time
      bot.Speed←3 ¯3 ⍝ Slow counter-clockwise rotation
     
      :Trap 1000 ⍝ Catch interrupts
          :Repeat
              log⍪←(t←z_gyro),now
          :Until t>angle-7 ⍝ Stop rotating 7 degrees before we are done    
      :EndTrap

      bot.Speed←0 ⍝ cut power to the motors
      :For i :In ⍳25 ⍝ Capture data as we slow down
          log⍪←z_gyro,now
      :EndFor
    ∇

The logged data from the rotation captured in the video at the top is charted below:

Even with the primitive integration and rotation strategies, the results already look quite promising. I’ll be taking most of this week off – part of it without access to the internet(!), but once I am back, expect the next blog entry to explore writing functions that accelerate and slow down in a more controlled fashion as well as stop at the right spot rather than relying on a specific amount of friction to rotate through the last 7 degrees (note the very slight reverse rotation at the end, probably caused by the Persian carpet being a bit “springy”). I will also clean up the code and post the complete solution on GitHub – and perhaps even look at some better integration techniques.

If you would like to make sure you don’t miss the next installment, follow the RSS feed or Dyalog on Twitter.

Dancing with the Bots

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Morten Kromberg

Last week the ‘bots were busy preparing for the J Language Conference in Toronto, where they made their first public appearance together. Upon returning to Bramley they continued training and we are proud to present the first recording of their new dance:

The ‘bots are both running the same DyaBot class as last year. This class exposes a property called Speed, which is a 2-element vector representing the speed of the right and left wheels respectively. Valid values range from +100 (full speed ahead) to -100 (full reverse). The annotations displayed at the top left show the settings used for each step of the dance.

Controlling Two Robots at Once using Isolates

Isolates are a new feature included with Dyalog version 14.0, designed to make it easy to perform distributed processing. In addition to making it easy to used all the cores on your own laptop or workstation, isolates make it possible to harness the power of other machines. This requires the launching of an “isolate server” on each machine that wants to offer its services:

Starting an isolate server using PuTTY to run Dyalog on the robot.

Starting an isolate server on DyaBot00 using PuTTY.

Once we have an isolate server running on each robot we can take control of them from a remote session as follows:

      )load isolate
      #.isolate.AddServer 'dyabot00' (7052)      
      #.isolate.AddServer 'dyabot04' (7052)
      bots←isolate.New¨Bot Bot
      bots.Init
 dyabot00  dyabot04

Above, we create two instances of the Bot namespace. The expression Bots.Init invokes the Init function, which returns the hostname, in each isolate:

:Namespace Bot

    ∇ r←Init;pwd
      pwd←∊⎕SH'pwd' ⍝ Find out where to copy from
      #.⎕CY botws←pwd,'/DyaBot/DyaBot.dws' ⍝ copy ws
      i←⎕NEW #.DyaBot ⍬ ⍝ Make DyaBot instance    
      r←⎕SH'hostname' ⍝ Return hostname
    ∇

:EndNamespace

Next, we define a function “run” that will take a vector of dance steps as input. Each step is a character vector (because that makes editing slightly easier!) containing five numbers: The first two set the speed of one robot, the next two the speed of the other and the fifth defines the duration of the step. After each step we pause for a second, to give humans time to appreciate the spectacle:


    ∇ run cmds;data;i;cmd;z
[1]    ⎕DL 5
[2]    :For i :In ⍳≢cmds
[3]        :If ' '∨.≠cmd←i⊃cmds
[4]            data←1 0 1 0 1⊂2⊃⎕VFI cmd ⍝ Cut into 3 numeric pieces
[5]            z←bots.{i.Speed←⍵}2↑data ⋄ ⎕DL⊃¯1↑data ⋄ z←bots.(i.Speed←0)
[6]            ⎕DL 1
[7]        :EndIf
[8]    :EndFor
    ∇

Now we are ready to roll: Call the run function with a suitable array and watch the robots dance (see the video at the top)!

      ↑choreography
50  50  0   0 1.5
 0   0 50  60 1.2
50 ¯50 50 ¯50 0.3
20  80 10  70 5  
50 ¯50 50 ¯50 0.3
50  50  0   0 1.5
 0   0 50  60 1.2

      dance choreography

Join us again next week to hear what happened when Romilly came to Bramley to help wire up the accelerometer and gyro!

Creating Shortcuts (Microsoft Windows)

Posted on July 28, 2014 by John Daintree

At Dyalog, a developer not only needs access to all of the readily available editions of the interpreter but also to earlier versions that are no longer officially supported. On my Microsoft Windows Desktop I have a folder that contains a shortcut to my developer builds of all these interpreters.

I’ve recently suffered a complete failure of my C drive which, of course, contained my Windows desktop and all my shortcuts – which were lost.

The Dyalog interpreter exists in Classic and Unicode editions and 32 and 64 bit flavours…for versions from 12.0 to 14.1 this is a total of 28 interpreters. I couldn’t bring myself to create each of those 28 shortcuts by hand; let’s not even consider that if I were to build both debug and optimised binaries that would be 56 shortcuts!

Fortunately we have an old COM example (in the shortcut.dws workspace) which is shipped with the product. It’s a trivial exercise to call the supplied SHORTCUT function in one or more (ahem!) loops to create all the required shortcuts:

 Dyalogs;vers;chars;bits;location;v;c;b;dyalog;dir;name

 vers←'12.0.dss' '12.1.dss' '13.0.dss' '13.1.dss' '13.2.dss' '14.0.dss' 'trunk'
 chars←'classic' 'unicode'
 bits←'32' '64'

 ⎕NA'u shell32|SHGetFolderPath* u u u u >0T'
 location←'\Dyalog',⍨2⊃SHGetFolderPath 0 0 0 0 255

 :For v :In vers
     :For c :In chars
         :For b :In bits

             dir←'e:\obj\',v,'\2005\apl\win\',b,'\',c,'\winapi\dev\dbg'
             dyalog←dir,'\dyalog.exe'
             name←'.lnk',⍨location,'\',({v↓⍨('.dss'≡¯4↑v)/¯4}v),' ',b,' ',c

             name SHORTCUT dyalog dir'' 1('' 0)0 ''
         :End
     :End
 :End

Aligning Diff Output

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Morten Kromberg

‘Bots are off limits this week so here is a story from this year’s Iverson College – a fantastic week spent in the company of a wonderful mixture of array and functional language gurus and newbies, all learning from each other. One evening, Dhru Patel presented a problem that he was working on which involved displaying the results of a “diff” side by side with the matched rows aligned. For example, the input might be:

      OLD NEW
┌────────┬────────┐
│This    │This    │
│is the  │original│
│original│is not  │
│text    │        │
└────────┴────────┘

Edited by Yoda, the text was. The selection of rows to be aligned requires finding the longest sequence of rows from the original data that matches rows in the edited data without ever skipping backwards through either sets of data. In this case, it is the original first and third row, matching the first two edited rows. We will return to how we might identify these rows in a future blog entry (meanwhile, try to grok John Scholes’ YouTube video on Depth First Searching and think about it). For now, we will provide this information as a left argument, a vector of Boolean vectors that marks the location of the matched rows:

      (1 0 1 0)(1 1 0) AlignMatched OLD NEW
┌────────┬────────┐
│This    │This    │
│is the  │        │
│original│original│
│text    │        │
│        │is not  │
└────────┴────────┘

At Iverson College there was general agreement that “there should be a non-looping solution”, and Devon McCormick immediately stated that he would bet that it involved grade (⍋). Let us explore:

      masks←(1 0 1 0)(1 1 0)
      ⎕←matched←∊masks ⍝ The two match masks catenated together
 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 
      ⎕←origin←(≢¨OLD NEW)/0 1 ⍝ 0 for items from the old array, 1 for new
 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 
      ⎕←block←∊+\¨masks ⍝ running count of matched rows
 1 1 2 2 1 2 2   
      ⎕←data←block,(~matched),origin,OLD⍪NEW
1 0 0 This    
1 1 0 is the  
2 0 0 original
2 1 0 text    
1 0 1 This    
2 0 1 original
2 1 1 is not

Our goal is to create an expansion mask for each argument; this is going to insert blank lines at the points where a non-matched row from the other argument is included. The next step is to reorder everything by ascending block number, and within each block move the matched rows to the front (ascending by ~matched), as follows:

      ⎕←data←data[⍋data[;1 2];]
1 0 0 This    
1 0 1 This    
1 1 0 is the  
2 0 0 original
2 0 1 original
2 1 0 text    
2 1 1 is not

This contains all the items from both texts in the order that they would need to appear in the final results. We can extract the reordered flag vectors:

       matched←~data[;2] ⋄ origin←data[;3]

Now, (origin=0) is an expansion mask that would expand OLD to match the above, and (origin=1) would do the same for NEW:

      0 1 {(origin=⍺)⍀⍵}¨OLD NEW
┌────────┬────────┐
│This    │        │
│        │This    │
│is the  │        │
│original│        │
│        │original│
│text    │        │
│        │is not  │
└────────┴────────┘

To align the matched rows, we need to eliminate inserted blanks that correspond to matched rows from the other side:

      0 1{((~matched∧origin≠⍺)/origin=⍺)⍀⍵}¨OLD NEW
┌────────┬────────┐
│This    │This    │
│is the  │        │
│original│original│
│text    │        │
│        │is not  │
└────────┴────────┘

In the final function, which collects the relevant lines of code from our experiments, we do not create the temporary “data” matrix, but reorder the origin and matched vectors individually – and instead of doing grade up on a two-column matrix, we compute an integer vector that will sort by descending matched within ascending block (because we know that grade up on a simple small-range integer vector will run like greased lightning):

 AlignMatched←{                ⍝ align matched rows of 1⊃⍵ and 2⊃⍵
     matched←∊⍺                ⍝ matches are marked by 1⊃⍺ and 2⊃⍺
     origin←(≢¨⍵)/0 1          ⍝ identify origin of items in matched (0=old. 1=new)
     block←∊+\¨⍺               ⍝ running count of matched rows
     order←⍋(2×block)-matched  ⍝ Order so matching rows are adjacent and order of
     (origin matched)←(⊂⊂order)⌷¨origin matched ⍝ items following matched row is preserved
     0 1{((~matched∧origin≠⍺)/origin=⍺)⍀⍵}¨⍵ ⍝ Expand exluding matched from "other" list
 }

Reviving Lost Arts

The algorithm above makes use of techniques that were well-known in APL circles in the 1980s, but atrophied after nested arrays arrived on the scene and applications tended to keep parts of the data in separate leaves of an array rather than using simple data structures.

If you would like to read up on some of the old techniques, you might enjoy browsing the FinnAPL Idiom Library, and Bob Smith’s immortal Boolean Functions and Techniques. Although nested arrays might have made them a little less relevant in the 90s and 00s, the search for high-performance parallel solutions could bring them back, as explained in this session from Dyalog ’12, on Segmented Scans and Nested Data Parallelism by Andrzej Filinski.

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