Neighborhood

A Neighborhood is a set of pairs (cell, weight), where cell is a neighbor Cell and weight is a number storing the relation's strength. Each Cell can have one or more Neighborhoods to represent its proximity relations.

This type is used to create Neighborhoods from scratch to be used by Cell:addNeighborhood(). To create well-established Neighborhoods see CellularSpace:createNeighborhood(). Neighborhoods can also be loaded from external soures using CellularSpace:loadNeighborhood(). It is recommended that a Neighborhood should contain only Cells that belong to the same CellularSpace, as it guarantees that all its Cells have unique identifiers. Calling forEachNeighbor() from a Cell traverses one of its Neighborhoods.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()
n = Neighborhood{}

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Functions

add	Add a new Cell to the Neighborhood.
clear	Remove all Cells from the Neighborhood.
getWeight	Return the weight of the connection to a given neighbor Cell.
isEmpty	Return whether the Neighborhood does not contain any Cell.
isNeighbor	Return whether a given Cell belongs to the Neighborhood.
remove	Remove a Cell from the Neighborhood.
sample	Return a random Cell from the Neighborhood.
setWeight	Update a weight of the connection to a given neighbor Cell.
#	Return the number of Cells in the Neighborhood.

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add

Add a new Cell to the Neighborhood. If the Neighborhood already contains such Cell then it will stop with an error.

Arguments

• #1: A Cell to be added.
• #2: A number representing the weight of the connection. The default value is 1.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()
c = Cell{}
n:add(c, 0.02)

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clear

Remove all Cells from the Neighborhood. In practice, it has the same behavior as calling Neighborhood() again if the Neighborhood was not added to any Cell.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()
n:clear()

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getWeight

Return the weight of the connection to a given neighbor Cell. It returns nil when the Cell is not a neighbor.

Arguments

• #1: A Cell.

Usage

c = Cell{}
n = Neighborhood()
n:add(c, 0.5)

print(n:getWeight(c))

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isEmpty

Return whether the Neighborhood does not contain any Cell.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()

if n:isEmpty() then
    print("is empty")
end

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isNeighbor

Return whether a given Cell belongs to the Neighborhood.

Arguments

• #1: A Cell.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()
c = Cell{}

n:add(c)
if n:isNeighbor(c) then
    print("is neighbor")
end

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remove

Remove a Cell from the Neighborhood.

Arguments

• #1: The Cell that is going to be removed.

Usage

c1 = Cell{id = "1"}
c2 = Cell{id = "2"}

n = Neighborhood()
n:add(c1)
n:add(c2)

print(#n)
n:remove(c1)
print(#n)

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sample

Return a random Cell from the Neighborhood.

Usage

c1 = Cell{id = "1"}
c2 = Cell{id = "2"}

n = Neighborhood()
n:add(c1)
n:add(c2)

cell = n:sample()
print(type(cell))

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setWeight

Update a weight of the connection to a given neighbor Cell.

Arguments

• #1: A Cell.
• #2: A number with the new weight.

Usage

c = Cell{}
n = Neighborhood()
n:add(c, 0.5)

print(n:getWeight(c))
n:setWeight(c, 0.01)
print(n:getWeight(c))

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#

Return the number of Cells in the Neighborhood.

Usage

n = Neighborhood()

print(#n)