I created a very simple Student class with a GPA field. I the created and initialized an array of students and use the built-in Arrays.sort method to sort by GPA. Now I'd like to use Arrays.sort to randomly scramble the list. By randomly scramble I mean that there are n distinct Student objects stored in a 1d array of size n. After scrambling each will be in a new array position, the chances being equal for each to be in any of the positions. Could you help me with this? I tried but the result didn't seem to be random. Any example would be appreciate it. Thanks.
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a_b's approach sounds good, but if you want to continue to utilize the Arrays collection with the Arrays.sort(T[], Comparator<T>) overload. You can have your custom Comparator utilize Random in some fashion like taking the hashcode of the Student class and multiply by some random value that you can make larger than array length if you want since you are not using as index but just a means to generate numbers that can then be compared for random sorting.
Kevin
Good thought, ozlevanon. Definitely a lot of power already built into the Collections API which is where I was going with the sort() using Comparator, but you just took it to next level which is even better as don't need to write any new functionality as you can pass an array to a function, convert it to list as you showed, shuffle it, and return an array from the list.
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by: a_bPosted on 2009-11-05 at 21:30:24ID: 25756789
Here is someone who tried to do the samething - http://www.experts-exchang
Pseudo code -
Pick 2 random numbers (min = 0 , max = array size)
Swap the indexes.