Create a random order of (x, y) pairs, without repeating/subsequent x's

Question

Say I have a list of valid X = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and a list of valid Y = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

I need to generate all combinations of every element in

Answer 1

Here's a solution using NumPy

def generate_pairs(xs, ys):
    n = len(xs)
    m = len(ys)
    indices = np.arange(n)

    array = np.tile(ys, (n, 1))
    [np.random.shuffle(array[i]) for i in range(n)]

    counts = np.full_like(xs, m)
    i = -1

    for _ in range(n * m):
        weights = np.array(counts, dtype=float)
        if i != -1:
            weights[i] = 0
        weights /= np.sum(weights)

        i = np.random.choice(indices, p=weights)
        counts[i] -= 1
        pair = xs[i], array[i, counts[i]]
        yield pair

Here's a Jupyter notebook that explains how it works

Inside the loop, we have to copy the weights, add them up, and choose a random index using the weights. These are all linear in n. So the overall complexity to generate all pairs is O(n^2 m)

But the runtime is deterministic and overhead is low. And I'm fairly sure it generates all legal sequences with equal probability.