What's the quickest way to find all possible pairs in list?

Question

Basically I have list of players, and I want to pair them up so that each player will play everyone once. What\'s the quickest way to find this data?

Answer 1

I put together 2 implementations to compare performance with. The very naive version 1 is about 50% slower than the version 2. That's not to say that nothing faster exists.

class Program
{
    class Player
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }

        public Player(string name)
        {
            Name = name;
        }
    }

    class Match
    {
        public readonly Player Player1;
        public readonly Player Player2;

        public Match(Player player1, Player player2)
        {
            Player1 = player1;
            Player2 = player2;
        }

        public override string ToString()
        {
            return string.Format("{0} vs. {1}", Player1.Name, Player2.Name);
        }
    }

    static readonly List _players = new List()
    {
        new Player("John"),
        new Player("Lisa"),
        new Player("Matt"),
        new Player("Dan"),
        new Player("Steve"),
        new Player("Sarah"),
        new Player("Tim")
    };

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        const int count = 1000000;

        {
            var v1 = V1();
            var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
            {
                v1 = V1();
            }
            Console.WriteLine(v1);
            Console.WriteLine(sw.Elapsed);
        }

        {
            var v2 = V2();
            var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
            for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
            {
                v2 = V2();
            }
            Console.WriteLine(v2);
            Console.WriteLine(sw.Elapsed);
        }


        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    static List V1()
    {
        var challengers = new List(_players);
        var matches = new List();
        foreach (var player in _players)
        {
            challengers.Remove(player);
            foreach (var challenger in challengers)
            {
                matches.Add(new Match(player, challenger));
            }
        }
        return matches;
    }

    static List V2()
    {
        var matches = new List();
        for (int i = 0; i < _players.Count; i++)
        {
            for (int j = i + 1; j < _players.Count; j++)
            {
                matches.Add(new Match(_players[i], _players[j]));
            }
        }
        return matches;
    }
}