Understanding the Dot Product Through Practical Decision-Making Examples
By
egonschiele
The kind of bagel that ruins lesser bagels for you.
Summary
This article explains the dot product concept in linear algebra through a practical real-world example of choosing a city to live in. The author uses a scenario where they and their wife scored cities based on criteria like weather and affordability, then demonstrates how weights can be applied to prioritize certain factors (like preferring San Francisco's weather) using the dot product mathematical operation.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledWhen my wife and I were deciding which city to live in, we made a list of cities, and scored each city based on some criteria.
You can see we loved the weather in San Francisco, but Minneapolis was way cheaper to live in.
After this was done, we just added up the columns to figure out which city to live in!
Here's the thing, though: I really liked the weather in San Francisco. I wanted some way to do this calculation, but have the weather matter more.
Well, I could do that by using weights.
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