java shuffle,Java的Collections.shuffle是做什么的？

I recently found myself needing to be sure my list wasn't in order. Hibernate was nice enough to return it in perfect order. Silly hibernate, not reading my mind.

I looked at my Java API and it tells me its shuffle method does this:

Randomly permutes the specified list using a default source of randomness.

Being the curious george that I am, I want to know what exactly this means. Is there a math course I can take to learn this? Can I see the code? Java, what are you doing to my ArrayList?!?!?

To be more specific, which math concepts are being used here?

解决方案

Yes, you can look at the code; it basically does a Fisher-Yates shuffle. Here it is (thanks OpenJDK, and yay for open source :-P):

public static void shuffle(List> list, Random rnd) {

int size = list.size();

if (size < SHUFFLE_THRESHOLD || list instanceof RandomAccess) {

for (int i=size; i>1; i--)

swap(list, i-1, rnd.nextInt(i));

} else {

Object arr[] = list.toArray();

// Shuffle array

for (int i=size; i>1; i--)

swap(arr, i-1, rnd.nextInt(i));

// Dump array back into list

ListIterator it = list.listIterator();

for (int i=0; i

it.next();

it.set(arr[i]);

}

}

}

The swap method:

private static void swap(Object[] x, int a, int b) {

Object t = x[a];

x[a] = x[b];

x[b] = t;

}