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Spy Easter egg

Posted By Yair Altman On April 11, 2009 | 4 Comments

For the 2009 Easter holiday, I thought I’d post a Matlab Easter egg, which I found on http://www.eeggs.com/items/47352.html [1]: spy is a built-in stock Matlab function for visualizing sparse matrices. If you run spy with no input arguments, it uses an undocumented default built-in sparse matrix that generates one of the spies in the famous Spy vs. Spy [2] comics series:

spy;

Matlab spy Easter egg

Related posts:

  1. Spy Easter egg take 2 [3] – The default spy Easter-egg image in the spy function has recently changed. ...
  2. Image Easter egg [4] – The default image presented by Matlab's image function has a very interesting undocumented story....
  3. Undocumented scatter plot behavior [5] – The scatter plot function has an undocumented behavior when plotting more than 100 points: it returns a single unified patch object handle, rather than a patch handle for each specific point as it returns with 100 or less points....
  4. Performance: scatter vs. line [6] – In many circumstances, the line function can generate visually-identical plots as the scatter function, much faster...
  5. Using Infiniband with Matlab Parallel Computing Toolbox [7] – Infiniband networking can significantly improve PCT performance in Matlab parallelization and distributed computing. ...
  6. Bar plot customizations [8] – Matlab bar charts can be customized in various nifty ways. ...

Categories: Low risk of breaking in future versions, Stock Matlab function, Undocumented feature

4 Comments (Open | Close)

4 Comments To "Spy Easter egg"

#1 Comment By Naor On April 12, 2009 @ 15:46

‘spy’ with no arguments was one of the first MATLAB commands I learned 🙂
another one was ‘why’ with no arguments, maybe you consider that an Easter egg as well…

#2 Comment By Yair Altman On April 12, 2009 @ 23:08

@Naor – the difference is that why with no args is documented, so it’s fun but not a real Easter egg.
Spy with no args is not documented.

#3 Pingback By Image Easter egg | Undocumented Matlab On April 6, 2010 @ 10:28

[…] Last year I presented the Matlab Spy Easter egg for the 2009 Easter holiday. This year, slightly late, I present another Easter egg […]

#4 Pingback By Spy Easter egg take 2 | Undocumented Matlab On April 5, 2012 @ 00:36

[…] Three years ago, I posted a short post about Matlab’s built-in Easter egg in the spy function […]

Article printed from Undocumented Matlab: https://undocumentedmatlab.com

URL to article: https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/spy-easter-egg

URLs in this post:

[1] http://www.eeggs.com/items/47352.html: http://www.eeggs.com/items/47352.html

[2] Spy vs. Spy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy

[3] Spy Easter egg take 2 : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/spy-easter-egg-take-2

[4] Image Easter egg : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/image-easter-egg

[5] Undocumented scatter plot behavior : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/undocumented-scatter-plot-behavior

[6] Performance: scatter vs. line : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/performance-scatter-vs-line

[7] Using Infiniband with Matlab Parallel Computing Toolbox : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/using-infiniband-with-matlab-parallel-computing-toolbox

[8] Bar plot customizations : https://undocumentedmatlab.com/articles/bar-plot-customizations

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