That's a good comparison for the general question I posed. Thanks. Although I do believe lists are less than ideal here and a different data structure should be used.
To be more specific to my case: As mentioned in my original post, I also have the specific condition that one does not know which nodes to turn ON until after all the probabilities are calculated (lets say we take the top m for example). In this case, the second and third will perform worse as the second one will require a remove from the list after the fact and the third will require another loop through the nodes to build the new list. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list