(Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to suggest this as more than an ad-hoc solution for a throwaway script. But to me, "sorted by random key" is almost as obvious as "shuffled", perhaps more so for non english speakers with little background in CS terms; the words "sorted" and "random" jumps to the eye, and sometimes you don't need more than that)
~Elazar
On 09/06/2016 03:37 PM, Sven R. Kunze wrote:
>
> Besides being a silly argument, it's an interesting solution.
>
> Does it really work? I remember Microsoft utilizing a similar approach
> for their browser selection tool which led to a skewed probability
> distribution. Maybe, I wrong here though.
>
Yes. The key is evaluated only once, so each element gets a
pseudo-random number. Sorting this list leads to a shuffle.
However, a super-linear shuffle, whilst Fisher-Yates is a linear
solution and also requires less additional memory.
Lastly, although it is obvious, from a software engineering standpoint,
this is a mere weird hack.
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