On 09/05/2010 02:22 PM, Evert Rol wrote:
I'm having a little problem figuring out how to accomplish this simple task. 
I'd like to take a list of 6 numbers and add every permutation of those numbers 
in groups of four. For example for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 add 1 + 1 + 1 +1 then 1 + 1 
+ 1 +2 etc. until reaching 6 + 6 + 6 + 6. Using a for loop, that was the easy 
part, now I'd like to take the results and count the number of times each 
number occurs.
My problem occurs when I try to create a list from the results of the for loop, 
it puts each individual number into its own list. I've looked everywhere for 
the solution to this and can find nothing to help.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated
If you had some code, that would be very helpful. Now it's a bit of guesswork 
what exactly you have (code tends to be clearer than a full paragraph or two of 
text).
At least, I currently don't understand what your problem is (or what your 
for-loop involves).
Eg, are you looping and calling a function recursively, do you have four nested 
loops (or nested list comprehensions)? Or some other convenient loop to step 
through all combinations?

Anway, if you have a recent Python version (2.7 or 3.1), the itertools module 
provides a handy utiity: 
http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/itertools.html#itertools.combinations_with_replacement
Eg,

map(sum, combinations_with_replacement(range(1,7), 4))
[4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 8, 9, 10, 11, 10, 11, 12, 12, 13, 14, 7, 8, 
9, 10, 11, 9, 10, 11, 12, 11, 12, 13, 13, 14, 15, 10, 11, 12, 13, 12, 13, 14, 
14, 15, 16, 13, 14, 15, 15, 16, 17, 16, 17, 18, 19, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 10, 11, 
12, 13, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 16, 11, 12, 13, 14, 13, 14, 15, 15, 16, 17, 14, 15, 
16, 16, 17, 18, 17, 18, 19, 20, 12, 13, 14, 15, 14, 15, 16, 16, 17, 18, 15, 16, 
17, 17, 18, 19, 18, 19, 20, 21, 16, 17, 18, 18, 19, 20, 19, 20, 21, 22, 20, 21, 
22, 23, 24]

seems to do what you want.

But, I'd still say to adopt your own code first, and when you've learned from 
that, just use the one-liner above. You're most welcome to ask your question, 
best done in combination with code, actual output and expected output. Then we 
can point you in the right direction.

Cheers,

   Evert

Thanks Evert, here is the code.


fourdsix = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
for i in fourdsix:
    for j in fourdsix:
        for k in fourdsix:
            for l in fourdsix:
                fourdsix_result = [i, j, k, l]
                attribs = sum(fourdsix_result) - min(fourdsix_result)
                print attribs

This gives me the proper results,
I'm not sure I understand that, because now you have a subtraction here; not 
sure what that does.

It removes the lowest number in the group of 4. It's intended to replicate rolling four six sided dice, eliminating the lowest number and adding the remaining 3 dice roll results. I didn't mention it cause I felt it wasn't germane to the problem and it might needlessly complicate the situation.

now it's just a matter of getting it into a list so I can further work with the 
data.
I've tried the following
attrib_list = [attribs]

and
attrib_list = []
attrib_list.append(attribs)
print attrib_list
This one should work, unless you've put it incorrectly inside the code. But 
otherwise, it will create the list you're looking for.
So then it's a matter of stepping through the numbers inside the list and 
counting their occurrences.

I've tried this in every place in the code, outside the loop, inside at each step of the loop and none of them get me what I want. Andre's suggestion that I put the empty list before the loop helped but it's still giving me multiple lists.
In fact, that could be done straight inside the quadruple nested for loops. One 
way I can think of, is using a dictionary, where the sum of the four-element 
list is the key, and the value increases by one each time. Eg:

try:
    counter[attribs] += 1
except KeyError:
    counter[attribs] = 1

or with dict.setdefault:

counter2[attribs] = counter2.setdefault(attribs, 0) + 1


(oh, and sorry: I missed the part where you wanted to count the number of times 
the sum appears in your initial email.)

but these both only create a list of the last number.

I'm sure there is a pre-existing module that will do all of this for me but I'm 
trying to learn by doing.
Definitely.
It's often fun to be surprised later by the amount of utilities available in 
the Python standard library, that would have solved a problem in a one-liner 
(also a bit frustrating, but not too much).

Cheers,

   Evert


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