I'm not sure how "as uniformly distributed as possible" can be qualified ...

Do you have a test-code to check the "quality" of a solution?

But sorting according to a weighting function gives similar results like shown by you.

  DB<171> %h=( A => 4, B => 2, C => 3, D => 1 )
 => ("A", 4, "B", 2, "C", 3, "D", 1)

  DB<172> $sum=0; $sum+=$_ for values %h; 
 => ""

  DB<173> @list=map  {  my ($k,$v)=($_,$h{$_}); my $int=$sum/$v; map {
+ [ $k => $int*($_-.5)] } 1..$v  } keys %h 
 => (
  ["A", "1.25"],
  ["A", "3.75"],
  ["A", "6.25"],
  ["A", "8.75"],
  ["D", 5],
  ["C", "1.66666666666667"],
  ["C", 5],
  ["C", "8.33333333333333"],
  ["B", "2.5"],
  ["B", "7.5"],
)

  DB<174> map {$_->[0]} sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] or $a->[0] cmp $b->
+[0]} @list
 => ("A", "C", "B", "A", "C", "D", "A", "B", "C", "A")

[download]

Changing the weighting function would also allow to repeat the pattern in a way that joined sequences are still equally distributed ( that is A doesn't neighbor A )

An iterator-version shouldn't be too difficult.

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

update

code simplified

update

well after second thought it's quite easy to find input where this approach fails ... never mind! :(

In reply to Re: Bag uniform distribution algorithms by LanX
in thread Bag uniform distribution algorithms by davido

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