On Apr 14, 6:06 pm, Raymond Hettinger <pyt...@rcn.com> wrote: > > I'm not sure a heap will help much, and at least to me, > > doesn't improve readability. > > nlargest() should save quite a few comparisons and run much faster > than sorted(). > > Not sure what the readability issue is. The phrase "nlargest(2, > iterable)" does exactly what it says, finds the 2 largest elements > from an iterable. That makes the programmer's intent more clear than > the slower, but semanticly equivalent form: sorted(iterable)[:2]. > > The running time for your algorithm can be very long, depending on the > inputs. Do you need an exact answer or can you approximate it with > sampling random combinations (i.e. choose the best two scores out of > 10000 samples). > > Raymond
You are of course correct. I was running on lack of sleep. Thanks again for having taken the time to help! I need an exact answer, but don't anticipate 2**m or n to be huge so even with e.g. m=10 and n=7 it should still be feasible. I can see how sampling would become necessary if m is large though. Much larger, and i'd have to think about optimizing the getValues function first though. thank you, David -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
