[Tutor] initialising all elements of a matrix

[Sivaram Neelakantan]

I was wondering whether there is a faster/better/cleaner way of
element wise operations of arbitrarily nested list.  I wrote something
like this for 1 level nested lists and am wondering whether there are
any good idioms in python.  I did this after a ridiculous amount of
bad thinking/missteps in python for the simplest of cases.

def init_p (arr):
    # input is always 2D matrix; init to uniform probability dist.
    q = []
    row = len(arr)
    col = len(arr[0])
    uni_dist = 1.0/(row *col)
    q = [ [uni_dist] * col for i in range(row)]
    return q

Of course, without using external packages like numpy or any other
 scientific packages.

 sivaram
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