“Cyclic” is a new function introduced in the recent Wolfram Mathematica 14.3 release. It represents a repeating sequence, something that we encounter often.

For example, how do we represent the sequence {1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4…}? “Cyclic” captures this idea. In other words “Cyclic[{1,2,3,4}]” denotes the same repeating sequence as above.

Other examples:

weekdays = Cyclic[{“Mon”, “Tue”, “Wed”, “Thu”, “Fri”, “Sat”, “Sun”}];

musicnotes = Cyclic[{“C”, “D”, “E”, “F”, “G”, “A”, “B”}];

How do we access the elements of a Cyclic object? See the figure below.

We can use any positive or negative number to access the element.

Let us assume that we want to take some number of elements (in the same order) from a Cyclic object. Here is how we can do it:

Let us create a RandomTree:

How about generating musical tones?

Let us add some instruments to make it more colourful!

Yes, “Cyclic” is indeed a nice abstraction to walk through an ordered sequence. I hope this article gives a good overview.

Have a nice weekend!