[Chicago] Printing out the Cartesian product.

[Lewit, Douglas]

Hi Joshua,

Well I'm not sure that's really true because in a Cartesian product you can
have repetition.  Last semester I took a computational biology course at
NEIU and we did Cartesian products on ("A", "T", "C", "G"), the four
nucleotide bases of DNA.  ("A", "A", "A", "A") is part of that product, but
if you're dealing with a true set then ("A", "A", "A", "A") is not allowed
because in a set you can't have repeated elements.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Joshua Herman <zitterbewegung at gmail.com>
wrote:

> What is your definition of the cartesian product because it is defined on
> sets not on lists?
> A list is most like a bag in set theory. A list is not a set.
>
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/533905/get-the-cartesian-product-of-a-series-of-lists-in-python
>
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 5:15 PM, Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I need some advice on how to do something.  Let's say that I want to
>> print out the Cartesian product of the integers 1 to 4.  It would look
>> something like this:
>>
>> 1, 1, 1, 1
>> 1, 1, 1, 2
>> 1, 1, 1, 3
>> 1, 1, 1, 4
>> 1, 1, 2, 1
>> 1, 1, 2, 2
>> 1, 1, 2, 3
>> 1, 1, 2, 4
>> 1, 1, 3, 1
>> 1, 1, 3, 2
>> 1, 1, 3, 3, etc, etc until finally we have
>> ..............
>> 4, 4, 4, 3
>> 4, 4, 4, 4
>>
>> This is NOT a permutation because repetition is allowed.  Nor is it a
>> combination because for example 1, 1, 1, 2 is distinct from 2, 1, 1, 1.  I
>> believe this is technically called a Cartesian product.
>>
>> I know of two ways to do this:
>>
>> Method #1:
>>
>> *for a in range(1, 5):*
>> *     for b in range(1, 5):*
>> *          for c in range(1, 5):*
>> *                for d in range(1, 5):*
>> *                      print( a, end = ", " )*
>> *                      print( b, end = ", " )*
>> *                      print( c, end = ", " )*
>> *                      print( d, end = "\n" )*
>>
>>
>> The above works just fine!  But there's a problem.  What if let's say I
>> want the Cartesian product of all the integers from 1 to 10?  That means
>> working with 10 nested for-loops!  That's insane!  It's tedious to write
>> and probably even worse for the person who is reading it.  So this method
>> is limited to smaller examples.
>>
>> Method #2:
>>
>> Cheat by using Python's itertools package!  (Or is it a library?  What's
>> the difference between a package and a library?)
>>
>> import itertools
>>
>> carProduct = itertools.product([1, 2, 3, 4], repeat = 4)
>>
>> *try:*
>> *     while True:*
>> *               print( next(carProduct) )*
>> *except StopIteration:*
>> *      pass*
>>
>> This method is short and sweet!  It works great!  But it's really
>> cheating in the sense that the programmer is taking advantage of code that
>> has already been written.  (I have nothing against doing that!  But in a CS
>> class if I write down that answer on an exam do you think the professor is
>> going to give me any credit?  Probably not!!!  LOL! )
>>
>> Is there some other way?  I'm guessing that I would need a for-loop that
>> contains a recursive function.  Or.... maybe a recursive function that
>> contains a for-loop?  I really don't know.  I've been struggling with this
>> for a couple days now and I can't think of a solution.  Can someone please
>> enlighten me?
>>
>> Gratefully,
>>
>> Douglas.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Chicago mailing list
>> Chicago at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chicago mailing list
> Chicago at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20150715/b1f6b72a/attachment.html>