Create many constrained, random permutation of a list

Posted by Eyal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Eyal
Published on 2008-09-18T15:00:27Z Indexed on 2010/05/02 0:47 UTC
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I need to make a random list of permutations. The elements can be anything but assume that they are the integers 0 through x-1. I want to make y lists, each containing z elements. The rules are that no list may contain the same element twice and that over all the lists, the number of times each elements is used is the same (or as close as possible). For instance, if my elements are 0,1,2,3, y is 6, and z is 2, then one possible solution is:

0,3
1,2
3,0
2,1
0,1
2,3

Each row has only unique elements and no element has been used more than 3 times. If y were 7, then 2 elements would be used 4 times, the rest 3.

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