random.choice from set? python

Question

I\'m working on an AI portion of a guessing game. I want the AI to select a random letter from this list. I\'m doing it as a set so I can easily remove letters from the list

Answer 1

You should use random.choice(tuple(myset)), because it's faster and arguably cleaner looking than random.sample. I wrote the following to test:

import random
import timeit

bigset = set(random.uniform(0,10000) for x in range(10000))

def choose():
    random.choice(tuple(bigset))

def sample():
    random.sample(bigset,1)[0]

print("random.choice:", timeit.timeit(choose, setup="global bigset", number=10000)) # 1.1082136780023575
print("random.sample:", timeit.timeit(sample, setup="global bigset", number=10000)) # 1.1889629259821959

From the numbers it seems that random.sample takes 7% longer.