Matrix Multiplication in pure Python?

Ammar picture Ammar · May 9, 2012 · Viewed 200k times · Source

I'm trying to multiply two matrices together using pure Python. Input (X1 is a 3x3 and Xt is a 3x2):

X1 =  [[1.0016, 0.0, -16.0514], 
       [0.0, 10000.0, -40000.0], 
       [-16.0514, -40000.0, 160513.6437]]
Xt =  [(1.0, 1.0), 
       (0.0, 0.25), 
       (0.0, 0.0625)]

where Xt is the zip transpose of another matrix. Now here is the code:

def matrixmult (A, B):
    C = [[0 for row in range(len(A))] for col in range(len(B[0]))]
    for i in range(len(A)):
        for j in range(len(B[0])):
            for k in range(len(B)):
                C[i][j] += A[i][k]*B[k][j]
    return C

The error that python gives me is this:

IndexError: list index out of range.

Now I'm not sure if Xt is recognised as an matrix and is still a list object, but technically this should work.

Answer

Akavall picture Akavall · May 9, 2012

If you really don't want to use numpy you can do something like this:

def matmult(a,b):
    zip_b = zip(*b)
    # uncomment next line if python 3 : 
    # zip_b = list(zip_b)
    return [[sum(ele_a*ele_b for ele_a, ele_b in zip(row_a, col_b)) 
             for col_b in zip_b] for row_a in a]

x = [[1,2,3],[4,5,6],[7,8,9],[10,11,12]]
y = [[1,2],[1,2],[3,4]]

import numpy as np # I want to check my solution with numpy

mx = np.matrix(x)
my = np.matrix(y)       

Result:

>>> matmult(x,y)
[[12, 18], [27, 42], [42, 66], [57, 90]]
>>> mx * my
matrix([[12, 18],
        [27, 42],
        [42, 66],
        [57, 90]])