Functional Python Programming

Permuting a collection of values

When we permute a collection of values, we'll elaborate all the possible orders for the items. There are ways to permute items. We can use permutations as a kind of brute-force solution to a variety of optimization problems.

By visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_optimization, we can see that the exhaustive enumeration of all permutations isn't appropriate for larger problems. The use of the itertools.permutations() function is a handy way to explore very small problems.

One popular example of these ...