comment on

And blam-o, you're set up to choose your next file, it's as if file_d.txt never existed, and you can repeat ad infinitum until you've selected enough files out

Depending on the number of files, what about just repetitively picking additional files until you get something different from the first? Your "pick" algorithm is fast, so why splice out a file and recompute offsets each time?

If you're picking a high percentage of the total files, then you'll be doing lots of useless picks of files already chosen, but if you're picking 2 of 300 files, it should work pretty well.

-xdg

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In reply to Re: Efficiently selecting a random, weighted element by xdg
in thread Efficiently selecting a random, weighted element by jimt

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