On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 1:24 AM, Abhiram R <abhi.darkn...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> A list of 100 elements has approximately 9.33 x 10**157 permutations. >> If you could somehow generate one permutation every yoctosecond, >> exhausting them would still take more than a hundred orders of >> magnitude longer than the age of the universe. >> -- >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > > > True that :D I may have exaggerated on the number. Let's consider something > more practically manageable => 50 elements with a 50! permutation. > Is there a solution now?
That's still infeasible, as others have pointed out. At one permutation every picosecond, you'll still need 9.6 x 10**44 years. If the size isn't that important to you and you just want a faster implementation of permutations, you could try reimplementing it yourself as a C extension. The stdlib implementation is already written in C though, so unless you have a better algorithm I doubt you'll find much room for optimization. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
