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Martin Ender Mod
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Random Golf of the Day

Meta: I am running this as a little series of challenges revolving around the topic of randomness - in the form of a 9-hole golf course. I'm maintaining a leaderboard across all challenges in the series, and offer a large bounty to the person competing in all of them with the lowest overall score.

Just to be clear, despite the name, I won't be posting these once a day. Expect the next one in 6 to 8 weeks.

About the Series

This will be a series of 9 challenges. See the first instalment for more information about the series.

#1: Shuffle an Array

#2: Numbers from a Normal Distribution

#3: Integer Partitions

#4: The Bertrand Paradox

#5: Diamond Tilings

#6: Roll a d20

#7: A distinctly random character (guest entry by trichoplax)

#8: Shuffle an infinite list

You should write a function or program which takes an infinite list as input and returns a shuffled version of that list.

About infinite I/O

There are several ways you can take input and produce output for this challenge:

  • You can either take a list of positive integers, or a string representation thereof, or a string or list of printable ASCII characters (0x20 to 0x7E, inclusive). The output format must match the input format. I'll just refer to the data as "the list" from now on, regardless of which option you choose.
  • You can read the list from an infinite standard input stream and write the output continuously to an infinite standard output stream. The solution should not depend on any particular value or sequence of values to ensure that the output stream is regularly written and flushed (e.g. you can't just write output whenever there's a 5 in the input list). Of course, if you read a string representation of a list, it's fine to wait until encountering the list separator.
  • In languages that support them, you can write a function that takes and returns a lazy infinite list or string.
  • In languages that support them you may implement an infinite generator that takes another generator as input.
  • Alternatively, you can write a function which takes no arguments and returns one output value each time it is called. In this case, you can assume that a function has been defined which takes no arguments and returns the next input value each time it is called. You may freely choose that function's name.

About the randomness

For any value v which is read at a position i of the infinite input, there must be a positive probability for it to end up in any of the positions i-9 to i+9 of the infinite output (unless that position would be negative). These probabilities don't have to be the same for different output positions or even for different input positions. It's fine if your solution can also shuffle the values to other position that are further away.

Hence, it's not necessary that your solution can shuffle the first value very far down the list, or that it can shuffle a very late value up to the first position, although it's fine if it does, as long as all positions 9 steps from the input are possible.

E.g. if you took the following string as input, the ___ indicates all the positions the X must be able to end up in the output:

 ___________________ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzXabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz... 

If your language lacks a built-in random number generator, you may take an additional seed value as input.

Regardless of the actual distribution your solution uses, it must almost surely produce the next value after a finite (but arbitrary) time.

Scoring

This is , so the shortest valid answer – measured in bytes – wins.

Further ideas (still unordered):

  • Poisson disc sampling: This is a method to randomly distribute points across the plane densely while maintaining a minimum distance between points. I think this might be nice to golf. Further reading.
  • Generate a random chessboard: The submissions should randomly produce a believable chessboard. "Believable" here mostly affects pawns: they may not appear on the first row of their colour, there may be more pieces of other types if pawns are missing (due to conversion), and two pawns may only be in the same column if at least one of the opponent's pieces is missing. Submissions should be able to generate any valid board with finite probability, but it doesn't have to be uniform.
  • Generate a random arithmetic expression: This basically asks to create a tree of binary and unary operators, subject to some constraint - either on the structure of the tree (n nodes, say) or on the result of the arithmetic expression (generate a random expression that evaluates to a given n).
  • Generate a random hole-free polyomino (or orthogonal polygon) (of given size).
  • Vague idea: Generate points on a sphere with uniform distribution.
  • Vague idea: I'd like to include a challenge on random walks.
  • Vague idea: I'd like to include a challenge which has to generate a random number with a constraint based on its digits, but where you're not allowed to use strings or arrays (so you have to access the digits arithmetically).
  • Idea I'm not sure about: Generate a valid Unicode character as a set of UTF-8 bytes with uniform randomness.
  • Idea: Implement a (specific) PRNG.
  • Idea: Generate a random Brainfuck program (or other balanced string). Would probably need to require uniform distribution and deterministic runtime to be interesting.
Martin Ender
  • 198.2k
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