Okay, so I'm working on a problem related to quantum chaos and one of the things I need to do is to map the unit cube in n-dimensions to a parallelepiped in n-dimensions and find all integer points in the interior of this parallelepiped. I have been trying to do this using the following scheme:
- Given the linear map B and the dimension of the cube n, we find the coordinates of the corners of the unit hypercube by converting numbers j from 0 to (2^n -1) into their binary representation and turning them into vectors that describe the vertices of the cube.
- The next step was to apply the map B to each of these vectors, which gives me a set of 2^n vectors describing the coordinates of the vertices of the parallelepiped in n dimensions
- Now, we take the maximum and minimum value attained by any of these vertices in each coordinate direction, i.e the first element of my vectors might have a maximum value of 4 across all of the vertices and a minimum value of -3 etc. This gives me an n-dimensional rectangular prism that contains my parallelepiped and some extra unwanted space.
- I now find all points with integer coordinates in this bounding rectangular prism described as vectors in n dimensions
- Finally, I apply the inverse of the map B to each of the points and throw away any points that have any coefficients greater than 1 as they must originally have lain outside my unit hypercube.
My issue arises in step 4, I'm struggling to come up with a way of generating all vectors with integer coordinates in my rectangular hyper-prism such that I can change the number of dimensions n on the fly. Ideally, i'd like to be able to increase n at will until it becomes too computationally heavy to do so, but every method of finding all integer points in the prism i've tried so far has relied on n for
loops to permute each element and thus I need to rewrite the code every time.
So I guess my question is this, is there any way to code this up so that I can change n on the fly? Also, any thoughts on the idea of the algorithm itself would be appreciated :) It wouldn't surprise me if i've overcomplicated things massively...
EDIT: Of course as soon as I post the question I see a lovely little link in the side-bar where a clever method has been given already for how to do this: Generate a matrix containing all combinations of elements taken from n vectors
I'll leave this up for the moment just in case anyone has any comments on the method in general, but otherwise (since I can't upvote yet I'll just say it here) Luis Mendo, you are a hero!