In this lesson, you will learn three different ways to define the distance between two points:
- Euclidean Distance
- Manhattan Distance
- Hamming Distance
Before diving into the distance formulas, it is first important to consider how to represent points in your code.
In this exercise, we will use a list, where each item in the list represents a dimension of the point. For example, the point (5, 8) could be represented in Python like this:
pt1 = [5, 8]
Points aren’t limited to just two dimensions. For example, a five-dimensional point could be represented as [4, 8, 15, 16, 23]
.
Ultimately, we want to find the distance between two points. We’ll be writing functions that look like this:
distance([1, 2, 3], [5, 8, 9])
Note that we can only find the difference between two points if they have the same number of dimensions!
Instructions
We’ve created a few points in script.py.
Create a new point named four_d
that has four dimensions.