On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 13:28, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Don't get me wrong, random.shuffle() is perfectly adequate for any use-case I can think of. But beyond 2080 items in the list, it becomes greatly biased, and I think that's important to note in the docs. Those who need to know about it will be told, and those who don't care can continue to not care.
Why anyone would care? Orderings possible to obtain from a given good random number generator are quite uniformly distributed among all orderings. I bet you can't even predict any particular ordering which is impossible to obtain. There is no time to generate all orderings. The factorial of large numbers is just huge. -- Marcin Kowalczyk qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/