Random Shuffles

This is more difficult. We have a list (x ₁ ,..., x _n ) and we want to shuffle it randomly.

The following, surprisingly simple, algorithm does the trick:

---

algorithm shuffle(x ,n )   // shuffle x ₁ ,..., x _n
begin
  for i = n downto 2 begin
    k = irand(1,i)
    swap over x _i and x _k
  end
end

 

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Why does this work? It seems that it is not doing enough `mixing up' to produce a genuinely random shuffle. We can only prove that it works if we have some notion of what we mean by a `random shuffle'. Let me keep things simple and say that a shuffling process is random if each element of the list can end up in any position in the list with equal probability. That is to say, in a list of n items there are n possible places that any given element can eventually occupy. I want each of these places to be equally likely.

So we now have to calculate the probability that our algorithm puts element x _i into position j , where 1 i , j n . If you look carefully at the algorithm you will see that element x _i end up in position j if it is not chosen on the first n - j steps of the algorithm and is chosen on the step n - j + 1. Since we know that irand(n , m ) is genuine we can use elementary methods to find that the probability of x _i ending up in position j is

  ^{. . ... .}   = ^. = ,