The Shape of Code

I’m busy putting together the experiment I will be running at the ACCU conference next week. If you are attending the conference please reserve your Thursday lunchtime slot for taking part as a subject!

Experiment generation invariably involves randomizing the sequence of items seen by every subject. While few languages support a randomise function many support sorting and random number generation. These two functions can be combined to create a randomize function; simply append a random number to the start of each item, sort it and then strip off the random number. Voilà a randomized list (awk code below).

function rand_items(items)
{
for (v in items)
   {
   items[v]=rand() " " items[v]
   }
asort(items)
for (v in items)
   {
   sp_pos=index(items[v], " ")
   items[v]=substr(items[v], sp_pos+1)
   }
}

This randomization problem is not yet listed on Rosetta code and probably has longer solutions in other languages.

Update (the next day).

The glow I have had for the last 10 years over coming up with a neat solution to a problem has now disappeared. Following the link kindly provided by D. Herring in the comments eventually lead me to the Fisher-Yates shuffle, which has performance (the call to sort is probably . The following shuffles a deck of cards:

for (i = 0; i < 52; i++)
   {
   j = i + (rand() % (52 - i));
   tmp = card[i];
   card[i] = card[j];
   card[j] = tmp;
   }

The proof of the uniform shuffling behavior of Fisher-Yates (also known as Knuth shuffle) is straight forward but not nearly as appealing as using rand and sort.