Creating random numbers with no duplicates

Question

In this case, the MAX is only 5, so I could check the duplicates one by one, but how could I do this in a simpler way? For example, what if the MAX has a value of 20? Thanks

Answer 1

Generating all the indices of a sequence is generally a bad idea, as it might take a lot of time, especially if the ratio of the numbers to be chosen to MAX is low (the complexity becomes dominated by O(MAX)). This gets worse if the ratio of the numbers to be chosen to MAX approaches one, as then removing the chosen indices from the sequence of all also becomes expensive (we approach O(MAX^2/2)). But for small numbers, this generally works well and is not particularly error-prone.

Filtering the generated indices by using a collection is also a bad idea, as some time is spent in inserting the indices into the sequence, and progress is not guaranteed as the same random number can be drawn several times (but for large enough MAX it is unlikely). This could be close to complexity
O(k n log^2(n)/2), ignoring the duplicates and assuming the collection uses a tree for efficient lookup (but with a significant constant cost k of allocating the tree nodes and possibly having to rebalance).

Another option is to generate the random values uniquely from the beginning, guaranteeing progress is being made. That means in the first round, a random index in [0, MAX] is generated:

items i0 i1 i2 i3 i4 i5 i6 (total 7 items)
idx 0       ^^             (index 2)

In the second round, only [0, MAX - 1] is generated (as one item was already selected):

items i0 i1    i3 i4 i5 i6 (total 6 items)
idx 1          ^^          (index 2 out of these 6, but 3 out of the original 7)

The values of the indices then need to be adjusted: if the second index falls in the second half of the sequence (after the first index), it needs to be incremented to account for the gap. We can implement this as a loop, allowing us to select arbitrary number of unique items.

For short sequences, this is quite fast O(n^2/2) algorithm:

void RandomUniqueSequence(std::vector &rand_num,
    const size_t n_select_num, const size_t n_item_num)
{
    assert(n_select_num <= n_item_num);

    rand_num.clear(); // !!

    // b1: 3187.000 msec (the fastest)
    // b2: 3734.000 msec
    for(size_t i = 0; i < n_select_num; ++ i) {
        int n = n_Rand(n_item_num - i - 1);
        // get a random number

        size_t n_where = i;
        for(size_t j = 0; j < i; ++ j) {
            if(n + j < rand_num[j]) {
                n_where = j;
                break;
            }
        }
        // see where it should be inserted

        rand_num.insert(rand_num.begin() + n_where, 1, n + n_where);
        // insert it in the list, maintain a sorted sequence
    }
    // tier 1 - use comparison with offset instead of increment
}

Where n_select_num is your 5 and n_number_num is your MAX. The n_Rand(x) returns random integers in [0, x] (inclusive). This can be made a bit faster if selecting a lot of items (e.g. not 5 but 500) by using binary search to find the insertion point. To do that, we need to make sure that we meet the requirements.

We will do binary search with the comparison n + j < rand_num[j] which is the same as
n < rand_num[j] - j. We need to show that rand_num[j] - j is still a sorted sequence for a sorted sequence rand_num[j]. This is fortunately easily shown, as the lowest distance between two elements of the original rand_num is one (the generated numbers are unique, so there is always difference of at least 1). At the same time, if we subtract the indices j from all the elements
rand_num[j], the differences in index are exactly 1. So in the "worst" case, we get a constant sequence - but never decreasing. The binary search can therefore be used, yielding O(n log(n)) algorithm:

struct TNeedle { // in the comparison operator we need to make clear which argument is the needle and which is already in the list; we do that using the type system.
    int n;

    TNeedle(int _n)
        :n(_n)
    {}
};

class CCompareWithOffset { // custom comparison "n < rand_num[j] - j"
protected:
    std::vector::iterator m_p_begin_it;

public:
    CCompareWithOffset(std::vector::iterator p_begin_it)
        :m_p_begin_it(p_begin_it)
    {}

    bool operator ()(const int &r_value, TNeedle n) const
    {
        size_t n_index = &r_value - &*m_p_begin_it;
        // calculate index in the array

        return r_value < n.n + n_index; // or r_value - n_index < n.n
    }

    bool operator ()(TNeedle n, const int &r_value) const
    {
        size_t n_index = &r_value - &*m_p_begin_it;
        // calculate index in the array

        return n.n + n_index < r_value; // or n.n < r_value - n_index
    }
};

And finally:

void RandomUniqueSequence(std::vector &rand_num,
    const size_t n_select_num, const size_t n_item_num)
{
    assert(n_select_num <= n_item_num);

    rand_num.clear(); // !!

    // b1: 3578.000 msec
    // b2: 1703.000 msec (the fastest)
    for(size_t i = 0; i < n_select_num; ++ i) {
        int n = n_Rand(n_item_num - i - 1);
        // get a random number

        std::vector::iterator p_where_it = std::upper_bound(rand_num.begin(), rand_num.end(),
            TNeedle(n), CCompareWithOffset(rand_num.begin()));
        // see where it should be inserted

        rand_num.insert(p_where_it, 1, n + p_where_it - rand_num.begin());
        // insert it in the list, maintain a sorted sequence
    }
    // tier 4 - use binary search
}

I have tested this on three benchmarks. First, 3 numbers were chosen out of 7 items, and a histogram of the items chosen was accumulated over 10,000 runs:

4265 4229 4351 4267 4267 4364 4257

This shows that each of the 7 items was chosen approximately the same number of times, and there is no apparent bias caused by the algorithm. All the sequences were also checked for correctness (uniqueness of contents).

The second benchmark involved choosing 7 numbers out of 5000 items. The time of several versions of the algorithm was accumulated over 10,000,000 runs. The results are denoted in comments in the code as b1. The simple version of the algorithm is slightly faster.

The third benchmark involved choosing 700 numbers out of 5000 items. The time of several versions of the algorithm was again accumulated, this time over 10,000 runs. The results are denoted in comments in the code as b2. The binary search version of the algorithm is now more than two times faster than the simple one.

The second method starts being faster for choosing more than cca 75 items on my machine (note that the complexity of either algorithm does not depend on the number of items, MAX).

It is worth mentioning that the above algorithms generate the random numbers in ascending order. But it would be simple to add another array to which the numbers would be saved in the order in which they were generated, and returning that instead (at negligible additional cost O(n)). It is not necessary to shuffle the output: that would be much slower.

Note that the sources are in C++, I don't have Java on my machine, but the concept should be clear.

EDIT:

For amusement, I have also implemented the approach that generates a list with all the indices
0 .. MAX, chooses them randomly and removes them from the list to guarantee uniqueness. Since I've chosen quite high MAX (5000), the performance is catastrophic:

// b1: 519515.000 msec
// b2: 20312.000 msec
std::vector all_numbers(n_item_num);
std::iota(all_numbers.begin(), all_numbers.end(), 0);
// generate all the numbers

for(size_t i = 0; i < n_number_num; ++ i) {
    assert(all_numbers.size() == n_item_num - i);
    int n = n_Rand(n_item_num - i - 1);
    // get a random number

    rand_num.push_back(all_numbers[n]); // put it in the output list
    all_numbers.erase(all_numbers.begin() + n); // erase it from the input
}
// generate random numbers

I have also implemented the approach with a set (a C++ collection), which actually comes second on benchmark b2, being only about 50% slower than the approach with the binary search. That is understandable, as the set uses a binary tree, where the insertion cost is similar to binary search. The only difference is the chance of getting duplicate items, which slows down the progress.

// b1: 20250.000 msec
// b2: 2296.000 msec
std::set numbers;
while(numbers.size() < n_number_num)
    numbers.insert(n_Rand(n_item_num - 1)); // might have duplicates here
// generate unique random numbers

rand_num.resize(numbers.size());
std::copy(numbers.begin(), numbers.end(), rand_num.begin());
// copy the numbers from a set to a vector

Full source code is here.