Welcome to Week 2. In this week we're going to be focusing on grid structures. While technically a grid is not a different
data structure, we will see that grids it's basically a way of
organizing the data spatially, and I think that that's
particularly interesting to us designers or people that operate within the design
space to really start thinking of how data structures could have a spatial
configuration. Let's look at the foundation or the basics of a grid.
So what is a grid? There's multiple kinds of grids I'm going to be
showing you here, orthogonal or square-like grid. But you could think about hexagonal grids and
other kinds of grids. We'll be linking to some of the documentation that you can read on different
kinds of grids. But let's start simple with
something more regular. This is orthogonal grid, and we can define
that columns and rows define the number of cells. We're going to identify
and use the word cells to identify each one of
the entries on a list, and how many cells do we have in X? That would
be our columns. How many cells do we have in Y? That would be our rows. If you think about it, this grid is going to contain data, we're not just drawing a grid or something that looks
like a grid graphically. We are thinking of
a data structure, something that will allow us to organize data in a
way that we could be reliably access the spatial
organization of that data. So we can do that with a list. I think that list is going
to be our main tool, but there's different
ways of using lists to create a grid. So we're going to
talk about probably at least two different
methods to use lists for the
construction of grids. You can see here on the
bottom right the cell size. This is often going
to be used for us when we really want to
start thinking of grids, also grids correlating to
a special environment. We really want to have a sense
that this piece of data, let's say it's a territory, it's a plane, or it's a section, it's something special, we might want to be
able to say, "Hey, the data contained
within the cell represents or maps to some
kind of spatial condition." That is not a requirement
of a data structure. A data structure could be
thought as a grid as well, but by no means requires a cell size to have a
correlation with anything else. It could be just a
piece of data that we organize in a grid format. There's great
operations that we can actually do by doing so. If you start thinking of entity that operates
within a list, we're going to be talking about relationships
between neighbors. What is the data
that is above me, below me, adjacent to me? All these operations are going to be incredible operations that are going to open up
different kinds of algorithms, different kind of computation that we could
ultimately exercise once we start organizing
our data in this fashion. So this is a foundation
of what we're going to be doing throughout
this second week. So let's get started. I'll see you in the next video, where we're going to start
constructing our first grid.