How to illustrate a cell array

I have the following cel array:

x{1}=[0 0 0 0];
x{2}=[0 0 -1 0 0];
x{3}=[0 0 0 1 1 0];
x{4}=[0 0 1 1 0];
x{5}=[-1 -1 0 -1];

Which supposed to represent the state of Abalone game board, like this:

Where zeros mean empty cell, -1's mean occupied by green marble, and 1's occupied by blues.

Is there any possible way to illustrate the board using my cell array?

[Jan]

What does "illustrate" mean here? What is the wanted output?

[Naza Karim]

Something that can show the board in a figure (two groups of marbles in different colors with the empty spaces shown in the corresponding positions).

[Joel Handy]

So is your question, "How do I take the cell array, and draw the figure I've sketched?"

The isnt going to be a simple one line function call like fig = drawAbalone(x); You'd need to process x and draw the board using things like the viscircles function

[Naza Karim]

I am aware. I just have no idea if there is any possible way to draw such a customised figure. Thank you though for pointing to viscircles function.

[Joel Handy]

It can definitely be done. viscircles should let you create a figure with all of the circles. The fill function will let you plot the hexagon. Placing all of the shapes should be inde[endant of X. all you need to do while plotting the board is refer to your cell array to choose colors.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

There are no doubt many ways of doing this, one relatively intuitive way would be to use scatter. This should get you started (but it is not intended to be final code):

x{1} = [0,0,0,0];
x{2} = [0,0,-1,0,0];
x{3} = [0,0,0,1,1,0];
x{4} = [0,0,1,1,0];
x{5} = [-1,-1,0,-1];
% Hexagon:
Px = [-2,2,3.7,2,-2,-3.7,-2];
Py = [-6,-6,-3,0,0,-3,-6];
patch(Px,Py,0.6*[1,1,1])
hold on
% Circles:
Fx = @(v)(1:numel(v))-numel(v)/2-1/2;
Fy = @(v,n)-v*ones(1,n);
Cx = cellfun(Fx,x,'uni',0);
Cy = arrayfun(Fy,1:numel(x),cellfun('length',x),'uni',0);
Sh = scatter([Cx{:}],[Cy{:}],1024,[x{:}],'filled')
% Colors:
caxis([-1,1])
colormap([0,0.8,0;1,1,1;0.2,0.2,1])
set(gca,'visible','off')

You could also hard-code the X and Y values, which would no doubt simplify the code.

Note that you can change the colors simply by updating the scatter object's CData property (i.e. you do not need to replot everything when you change the circle colors):

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.scatter-properties.html

[Naza Karim]

Thank you! this indeed helps a lot.