Visual notation for GraphBLAS operations
szarnyasg opened this issue · comments
Some thoughts on visualizing GraphBLAS operations in presentations.
Masks
Masks -- it might be worth making a distinction between〈M〉and〈¬M〉:
- regular mask: highlight elements which are to be computed with some background color, e.g. light grey
- complement of a mask: cross out matrix elements (
×) where the computation should not be performed.
The rationale behind this distinction is that is we would use the same for〈¬M〉, that would often mean highlighting most of the matrix.
Additionally:
- replace mask: It should suggest that the elements outside the mask are deleted. This is often quite obvious visually so maybe just adding a note 'replace' could suffice.
Highlight elements
If using colors is possible, we can use circles with borders.
Lessons learnt
I've used Wingdings to capture circled numbers but it had a few problems:
- Changing from the basic state to a highlighted state is time-consuming as it is a different character.
- For the same reason, animated highlights also do not work.
Using regular numbers in a circle is a better approach.