From: "Berger, Daniel" <Daniel.Berger@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T03:44:47+09:00
Subject: Re: More random, please ! :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Meino Christian Cramer [mailto:Meino.Cramer@gmx.de] 
> Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 12:28 PM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: More random, please ! :)
> 
> 
> Hi, 
> 
>  recently I asked, how one would distribute all letters of
>  the alphabet randomly and each statistically equal handled  
> (oh...damn...this looks like awful german English...sorry...)
> 
>  And the solution was too simple, as I would have thought
>  of it...hrrmmm...
> 
>  And now I fear, that the next question will result again in  
> such simple kind of answer since we all program ruby here...;)
> 
>  How can I distribute all 25 letters (I will skip the "J" for 
> this)  over a 5x5 matrix (two dimensional array) that way, 
> that each letter  is handled equally from the statistical 
> point of view ?

Will this do?

require 'matrix'
letters = ('a'..'z').sort_by{ rand }
letters.delete('j')
m = Matrix[ letters[0..4], letters[5..9], letters[10..14],
letters[15..19], letters[20..24] ]

I think there's a method to break an array into X equal parts, but I
can't recall.

Regards,

Dan