Merge two uneven sets of items

Question

I'm trying to get a fairly even distribution of one set of items into another and am looking for an algorithm that can help.

For example, Group A has 42 items and Group B has 16 items. I want to mix both groups together so that B is fairly evenly distributed within A. So, the merged group looks something like: {AA B AAA B AA B AA B AAA.....} It would be easy, of course, if A was a multiple of B, but that is not often the case for my needs.

Answer 1

Well, I've been playing around with this and have come up with a solution that will work for my purposes. I essentially mix the larger items into the smaller items and loop back through until I run out of larger items.

For Each item In smallerList
  mergedList.add(smallerID)
Next

itemsRemaining = biggerList.Count

While itemsRemaining > 0
  index = 0

  For i = 1 To smallerList.Count
    If index >= mergedList.Count or itemsRemaining = 0 Then Continue While

    mergedList.Insert(index , largerID)
    index += 2 + loopCount
    itemsRemaining -= 1
  Next

  loopCount += 1
End While

Then I can replace the IDs with the actual items from the two lists.

So, for my original example (Group 1 with 42 items and Group 2 with 16), I end up with:

111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 111 2 11 2 11 2 11 2 11 2 11 2 11 2

It's a bit front loaded, but for my purposes, this will work out just fine.