Perl Cookbook

Randomizing an Array

Problem

You want to shuffle the elements of an array randomly. The obvious application is writing a card game, where you must shuffle a deck of cards, but it is equally applicable to any situation where you want to deal with elements of an array in a random order.

Solution

Swap each element in the array with another randomly selected, element:

# fisher_yates_shuffle( \@array ) : generate a random permutation
# of @array in place
sub fisher_yates_shuffle {
    my $array = shift;
    my $i;
    for ($i = @$array; --$i; ) {
        my $j = int rand ($i+1);
        next if $i == $j;
        @$array[$i,$j] = @$array[$j,$i];
    }
}

fisher_yates_shuffle( \@array );    # permutes @array in place

Or, pick a random permutation using the code in Example 4.4:

$permutations = factorial( scalar @array );
@shuffle = @array [ n2perm( 1+int(rand $permutations), $#array ) ];

Discussion

Shuffling is a surprisingly tricky process. It’s easy to write a bad shuffle:

sub naive_shuffle {                             # don't do this
    for (my $i = 0; $i < @_; $i++) {
        my $j = int rand @_;                    # pick random element
        ($_[$i], $_[$j]) = ($_[$j], $_[$i]);    # swap 'em
    }
}

This algorithm is biased; the list’s possible permutations don’t all have the same probability of being generated. The proof of this is simple: take the case where we’re passed a 3-element list. We generate three random numbers, each of which can have three possible values, yielding 27 possible outcomes here. There are only 6 permutations of the 3-element list, though. Because 27 isn’t evenly divisible by 6, some outcomes are more likely than others.

The Fisher-Yates shuffle avoids this bias by changing the range of the random numbers it selects.

See Also

The rand function in perlfunc (1) and Chapter 3 of Programming Perl ; for more on random numbers, see Section 2.7, Section 2.8, and Section 2.9; Section 4.19 provides another way to select a random permutation