Have you tried contacting the paper's author(s)? Preferably the PhD student that did the actual work?
I used to do that when I couldn't make sense of a paper. Not all authors will respond, some might brush you off with a generic remark to read the appendix or whatever. But it's worth a try. In one case, the author frankly told me that the code didn't work as well as it sounded in the paper -- the algorithm was so instable that it wasn't very useful. But they couldn't have written that in the paper, or it might not have been accepted.
Good advice-I'll keep it in mind for future troubles. Thank you!
Notation makes a huge difference. LinAlg is a good example of this. And a PL is notation.
But if you fully understand the problem, notation is not an issue.
case-in-point: I am on hn right now because my research is going badly because I am using another researcher's code and I don't fully understand the correspondence between the paper and the code. I am getting terrible results on some multi-class classification (i.e. approximately random). I am not sure if I am using some wrong parameters or because the signal I am looking for doesn't exist in the data. Not knowing at least some mathematics would make this a LOT harder