The key to understanding inner product is that the inner dimensions of the arguments have to be the same. The inner dimension here is 3.
a←2 3⍴⍳6 b←3 4⍴⍳12 a 0 1 2 3 4 5 b 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 a+.×b 20 23 26 29 56 68 80 92 To solve this, first transpose the right argument such that the inner dimension goes to the back of the array and both arguments have the same number of columns. (¯1⌽⍳⍴⍴b)⍉b 0 4 8 1 5 9 2 6 10 3 7 11 a 0 1 2 3 4 5 Do the operations for every combination of rows in a and ⍉b. As we are doing +.× 0 1 2 × 0 4 8 is 0 4 16, +/0 4 16 is 20. First element of the result 0 1 2 × 1 5 9 is 0 5 18, +/0 5 18 is 23. Second element of the result And so on. Loop until done. Shape of the result is (¯1↓⍴a),1↓⍴b or 2 4 For the vector and vector case, the lengths of both vectors have to be the same. The result is simply +/ a × b For higher order matrices, as before, the inner dimensions are important. The others less so. a←2 5 1 3⍴⍳30 b←3 4 2⍴⍳12 Here the idea is to collapse (i.e. multiply together) all but the inner dimensions, then compute the result as if both arguments were two dimensional matrices. a←10 3⍴⍳30 b←3 8⍴⍳24 And as before, the shape of the product is (¯1↓⍴a),1↓⍴b or 2 5 1 4 2 See also http://www.dyalog.com/uploads/conference/dyalog16/presentations/U08_SIMD_Boolean_Array_Algorithms_slides.pdf (The part about the STAR Inner Product Algorithm) and http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/innerproduct/ip1.htm