I am writting a very simple script, one that plot a sin using jupyter notebook (python 3). when I put:
import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x=np.arange(0.0,5*np.pi,0.001)
y = np.sin(x)
plt.plot(x,y)
The plot is fine.
However if :
import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x=np.arange(0.0,5*np.pi,0.001)
np.random.shuffle(x)
y = np.sin(x)
plt.plot(x,y)
the image is
I don't understand why shuffling the x BEFORE I ran sin does it.
thank you
Let's first simplify things a bit. We plot 4 points and annote them with the order in which they are plotted.
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(42)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x=np.arange(4)
y = np.sin(x)
plt.plot(x,y, marker="o")
for i, (xi,yi) in enumerate(zip(x,y)):
plt.annotate(str(i), xy=(xi,yi), xytext=(0,4),
textcoords="offset points", ha="center")
plt.show()
No if we shuffle x and plot the same graph,
x=np.arange(4)
np.random.shuffle(x)
y = np.sin(x)
we see that positions of the points are still are the same, but while e.g. previously the first point was the one at (0,0), it's now the third one appearing there. Due to this randomized order, the connecting lines go zickzack.
Now if you use enough points, all those lines will add up to look like a complete surface, which is what you get in your image.
