I have a question... and ... whew ... i am gonna be honest, i haven't the slightest clue how to even start ... i am not sure if i used up all my good will here or can take a mulligan.. i love to try to at least post some lame broken code of my own at first... but like i said, not being a math person i am not even sure how to start or if it is even possible.
here's the deal... i have a dictionary that defines some collections.. like so: sets = { ('one') : [0, 4, 7, 9 ], ('two') : [0, 3, 7, 9 ], ('three') : [0, 4, 7, 11], ('four') : [0, 3, 7, 10 ], ('five') : [0, 4, 7, 10 ], ('six') : [0, 4, 8, 10 ], ('seven') : [0, 3, 6, 10], ('eight') : [0, 3, 6, 9 ], ('nine') : [0, 3, 7, 11 ], ('ten') : [0, 5, 7, 10 ] } I every time i call this function i would like like it to return a collection at random, any collection, so long as it has all but one element that is the same. So if i grab [0, 4, 7, 9 ] as my first set my next set could be: [0, 3, 7, 9 ], or [0, 4, 8, 9 ], or [0, 4, 7, 10], or [1, 4, 7, 9 ], since all these sets contain 3 elements in common with the first, and only one that is new or different... but if my first run give me: [0, 4, 7, 9 ] i would not get [0, 5, 7, 10 ], since this is set has 2 elements that are unique. The goal it to move from set to set to set to set always with a maximum of overlap & common elements. I wonder, if this is even possible, *and* if it can be done with sets that have as many as 7, 8, or even 9 elements or if this would be too slow to even attempt. cheers, kp8 [for the record using python 2.3 on a macintosh at the moment] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list