-- ----- no, because you're not stupid. You have to be into software development to know about them or theoretical mathematics. Let's start by saying that for purposes of software development that a matrix is synonymous with a table and both are synonymous with array. These are usually areas of memory reserved for work Microsoft; a program is to do. Applications that use arrays might be games that play cards with humans on computers. cribbage has at least two arrays one of them used for the deck of cards and another used for the board. The deck array keeps track of what cards have been drawn and the board array tracks positions of pegs on the board as moves are made so score can be computed accurately. In windows, several programs use arrays or matrices. Now, a sparse matrix is an optimized matrix that only has the exact number of positions in it or tupples that's needed to do its work. Positions that are always filled with garbage are left out and a further optimization is that search rules are used to compute values without use of the matrix whenever possible. These rules ask questions like is the position in matrix now row 3 column 2 and if there's always a zero in that position, the rule says if yes state answer as zero without even searching the matrix. A simplistic example would be an array that showed what month it was depending on the day number in a year. The way windows handles that array is 12 times 31 equals 382 tupples. Now we all know a year has at most 366 days in it. So a sparse array would have 1 times 366 tupples in it. To optimize this further there would be two rules to check for December. One of those would be if day number is greater than 334 it's december. This rule is true whether it's a leap year or not and one would want to state that rule more correctly as if day number is less than or equal to 366 and day number is greater than 334 then it's december. One of the reasons windows crashes so frequently is the lack of these sparse matrices. When doing sparse matrices, you check your programmed rules first, and if none of the conditions are satisfied in those programmed rules then as a last resort you do a table or matrix look up.mismanagement, and stupidity are all weapons of mass destruction.
