MATLAB: How to have a symbolic equation as an array element and then compute the determinant

cell arraysdeterminantmatricessymbols

Hello everyone,
I am trying to populate matrix elements so that I can take its determinant.
n=2;
r = [];
for (i=1:n)
  t = sym(['r' int2str(i)]);
  r = [r; t];
end
v=cell(n,1);
for i=1:n
  v{i}=zeros(n,n);
end
v{1}(1,1)=r(1)-1; -------->ERROR!
v{1}(2,1)=r(2)-1;
v{2}(1,1)=r(1)-1;
v{2}(2,1)=r(2)-1;
for i=1:n
  for j=1:n
      %v{i}(j,1)=v(j)-1;
      for k=2:n
          v{i}(j,k)=p{i}(k,j)-p{i}(1,j);
      end
  end
end
%above code should replace the below to allow for any values of n. The below code works fine.
v{1}=[v(1)-1,p{1}(2,1)-p{1}(1,1);v(2)-1,p{1}(2,2)-p{1}(1,2)];
v{2}=[v(1)-1,p{2}(2,1)-p{2}(1,1);v(2)-1,p{2}(2,2)-p{2}(1,2)];
%compute determinant
v_det=cell(n,1);
for i=1:n
  v_det{i}=det(v{i});
end
Error given is:
??? The following error occurred converting from sym to double:
Error using ==> mupadmex
Error in MuPAD command: DOUBLE cannot convert the input expression into a double array.
If the input expression contains a symbolic variable, use the VPA function instead.
help please!! I tried using the vpa function as suggested with no success.

Best Answer

You initialize v{1} as a numeric array, zeros(). Then you try to store r(1)-1 into it, but r(1) is a symbolic expression. Because it knows that the target v{1}(1,1) is a numeric data type, it tries to convert r(1)-1 to a numeric data type and fails.
Solution: do not initialize v{1} as numeric.
v{1} = [r(1)-1, 0; r(2)-1, 0];
You might have to go as far as
Z = sym(0);
v{1} = [r(1)-1, Z; r(2)-1, Z];
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