n dimensional grid in Python / numpy

Question

I have an unknown number n of variables that can range from 0 to 1 with some known step s, with the condition that they sum up to 1. I want to create a

Answer 1

We can think of this as a problem of dividing some fixed number of things (1/s in this case and represented using sum_left parameter) between some given number of bins (n in this case). The most efficient way I can think of doing this is using a recursion:

In [31]: arr = []
In [32]: def fun(n, sum_left, arr_till_now):
    ...:     if n==1:
    ...:         n_arr = list(arr_till_now)
    ...:         n_arr.append(sum_left)
    ...:         arr.append(n_arr)
    ...:     else:
    ...:         for i in range(sum_left+1):
    ...:             n_arr = list(arr_till_now)
    ...:             n_arr.append(i)
    ...:             fun(n-1, sum_left-i, n_arr)

This would give an output like:

In [36]: fun(n, n, [])
In [37]: arr
Out[37]: 
[[0, 0, 3],
 [0, 1, 2],
 [0, 2, 1],
 [0, 3, 0],
 [1, 0, 2],
 [1, 1, 1],
 [1, 2, 0],
 [2, 0, 1],
 [2, 1, 0],
 [3, 0, 0]]

And now I can convert it to a numpy array to do an elementwise multiplication:

In [39]: s = 0.33
In [40]: arr_np = np.array(arr)
In [41]: arr_np * s
Out[41]: 
array([[ 0.        ,  0.        ,  0.99999999],
       [ 0.        ,  0.33333333,  0.66666666],
       [ 0.        ,  0.66666666,  0.33333333],
       [ 0.        ,  0.99999999,  0.        ],
       [ 0.33333333,  0.        ,  0.66666666],
       [ 0.33333333,  0.33333333,  0.33333333],
       [ 0.33333333,  0.66666666,  0.        ],
       [ 0.66666666,  0.        ,  0.33333333],
       [ 0.66666666,  0.33333333,  0.        ],
       [ 0.99999999,  0.        ,  0.        ]])