Changes between Version 1 and Version 2 of soc/2007/UserFriendlyGraphs/Measures

Timestamp:

Jul 6, 2007, 1:57:32 PM (15 years ago)

Author:

Andrew Sutton

Comment:

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soc/2007/UserFriendlyGraphs/Measures

@@ -19 +19 @@
 
 This implementation simply has to return `dist[v]`, which means that `v` is a dummy parameter. I think this is perfectly acceptable. Despite the fact that the target vertex of the computation plays no part in the computation, it provides a nice point of reference from the readability standpoint. I can immediately see that the user is computing the geodesic distance between vertices u and v.
+
+== Problems ==
+Despite the improved readability of this approach, there is one drawback. It is possible to pass a vertex as the target that is not the vertex that the property is computed for. It may be possible to generalize and state that `dist[v] == 0` where `v` is the vertex for which the distance map was computed, but this doesn't hold for all graphs (e.g., probabalistic state transitions).
+
+My suggestion would be to simple excercise care when passing vertices to such computations, making sure that they actually refer to the vertex for which the distance maps are computed.