Hi all, I'm trying to find a good way of doing the following:
Each n-tuple in combinations( range( 2 ** m ), n ) has a corresponding value n-tuple (call them "scores" for clarity later). I'm currently storing them in a dictionary, by doing: ---- res={} for i in itertools.combinations( range( 2**m ) , n): res[ i ] = getValues( i ) # getValues() is computationally expensive ---- For each (n-1)-tuple, I need to find the two numbers that have the highest scores versus them. I know this isn't crystal clear, but hopefully an example will help: with m=n=3: Looking at only the (1, 3) case, assuming: getValues( (1, 2, 3) ) == ( -200, 125, 75 ) # this contains the highest "other" score, where 2 scores 125 getValues( (1, 3, 4) ) == ( 50, -50, 0 ) getValues( (1, 3, 5) ) == ( 25, 300, -325 ) getValues( (1, 3, 6) ) == ( -100, 0, 100 ) # this contains the second-highest, where 6 scores 100 getValues( (1, 3, 7) ) == ( 80, -90, 10 ) getValues( (1, 3, 8) ) == ( 10, -5, -5 ) I'd like to return ( (2, 125), (6, 100) ). The most obvious (to me) way to do this would be not to generate the res dictionary at the beginning, but just to go through each combinations( range( 2**m), n-1) and try every possibility... this will test each combination n times, however, and generating those values is expensive. [e.g. (1,2,3)'s scores will be generated when finding the best possibilities for (1,2), (1,3) and (2,3)] What I'm doing now is ugly, and i think is where i'm confusing myself: ---- best2={} for i in itertools.combinations( range( 2**m), n-1): scorelist=[] for j in range( 2**m ): if j not in i: k=list(i) k.append(j) k=tuple(sorted(k)) #gets the key for looking up the scores in res scorelist.append((j,res[k][k.index(j)])) best2[i]=sorted(scorelist,key=lambda x: -x[1])[:2] ---- Am I missing an obviously better way? Many thanks! David -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list