How about decorating your list of elements with an additional value, which indicates the weight of that element. A value of 1 will indicate 'as likely as any other', < 1 will be 'less likely than' any other and > 1 will be 'more likely than any other'. Then create a sorted list based on the combined value of weight and the output of random(); from this take the first N many elements to meet your requirements.
hth Jon On 27 Aug, 21:42, Ivan Voras <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I have a list of items, and need to choose several elements from it, > "almost random". The catch is that the elements from the beginning > should have more chance of being selected than those at the end (how > much more? I don't care how the "envelope" of probability looks like at > this point - can be linear). I see that there are several functions in > Python standard libraries for various distribution, but is there an easy > pythonic way to make them do what I need? > > signature.asc > 1KDownload -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
