Checking for loop coordinates to see whether two randomly generated positions are within 5 units of each other

Hello there,

I am in the process of coding a program that plots two people in a 100 x 100 unit area. Each person is allowed to move one unit per loop iteration, and there are 5000 iterations of the loop (for i=1:5000). I want to terminate the loop when the difference in positions, either in the x-axis or the y-axis, are equal to or less than 5. However, when I add an if statement or while loop to compute the difference between the x position and y position between the two people to check if it's less than or equal to 5, the entire position plot gets changed to two lines. Here are some examples:

c=man1x-man2x;
v=man1y-man2y; %these two are variables created to store the differences in position between the two people

while c > 5 && v > 5
     continue;
end
      break; % for some reason, the entire grid of numbers seems to change when this break is added to 5000 little movements to two      %diagonal lines that simply converge on each other.

if c >= 5 || v >= 5    
else
    break; %This one produces some results, but still gets buggy when break; is added. The program will still have 2 diagonal lines      %converge together from as far as 20 units away.
end

Any thoughts, assistance, advice, or insights would be greatly appreciated, as I cannot figure out why the break; command is what is causing the diagonal lines and the messy termination of my loop.

Thanks!

[Thorsten]

You have not given the plot part of the program, which does not what you want it to do... Please provide the full program.

BTW: you may want to look for absolute differences, i.e,. dx = abs(man1x - man2x); dy = abs(man1y - man2y);

[Joep]

Do you have a minimal work example.

[Geoff Hayes]

Out of curiosity, why does your code terminate the loop if there is difference of five between x or y? Why not use the (for example) Euclidean distance instead:

 dist = sqrt((man1x-man2x)^2 + (man1y-man2y)^2);
 while dist > 5
     continue;
 end

Answer 1

[Anusha B]

Hi Daniel,

1. Can you try using while loop instead of FOR loop for '5000 iterations'? OR 2. Can you execute the following command and execute your code? >> feature accel off

However, this command can affect MATLAB performance.