Preventing Duplicate Placement in 2D Array

[deanhystad]

Create a list of tuples for all possible combinations of row and col. Shuffle the list or randomly remove combinations from the list. This example shuffles the fields list and pops the combinations off the end.

from numpy import zeros, sum
import random
import itertools

N = 25 # number of people
A = 10 # length of field
B = 10 # width of field
D = 3 # columns for directory
directory = zeros((N,D),float)
# Create an entry for each row/column combination
fields = list(itertools.product(range(A), range(B)))
random.shuffle(fields)

for i in range(N):
    directory[i,0] = i
    directory[i,1], directory[i,2] = fields.pop()

print(directory)