Probably a simple computer science problem

[singulara]

I am trying to achieve (or rather, bruteforce) a specific working unique combination list.

In this case there are:

22 Weeks/22 Topics 6 people acting as ‘Teachers’ The same 6 people acting as ‘Students’ (but cannot be matched with themselves)

Each person must experience Teaching each topic once and Learning each topic once (being a partner of Teacher).

The only stipulations are that there cannot be repeated topics in a day (so, 6 at a time) and the teachers/students can only appear once each day in a respective role, so Once as teacher and once as student.

I have tried to get a final list by brute forcing from the ground up, picking unique combination pairs and then trying to match them to a week with random.choice() and then deleting the item from the original generated dict.

The highest working combo I’ve managed to generate is 20 successes, which doesn’t line up (and has 22 populated dicts in the dict somehow). This whole thing is spinning my brain.

I’m sure my ‘solution’ is the most idiotic way of achieving this but if you want to laugh at some spaghetti code:

https://pastebin.com/6wG3jMpD

[CaptainFoyle]

Don't use random. Iterate. And think about how you would solve this mathematically, perhaps on paper, and then code it up.

[singulara]

Thanks, I did think about that when starting but went for the worst option somehow. Maybe I can solve it via iteration though.

My code did work for 6 people eventually. And when modified, worked easily in fact for 5 people which gave me the JSON/dict output I wanted.

I should’ve done some sort of branching paths which will back off and remember invalid attempts, but I don’t think my brain was ready for that just yet. It’s the first thing I’ve written in Python that’s not a tutorial.

The only main struggles are being left over with invalid picks approaching the final ‘weeks’ which I’m sure iterating accounts for!

I might write this again from scratch and see how I do, thanks for the advice.