Mutate a list of lists of integers with specific probability

Question

I have the following list of integers:

[[0, 2, 3, 1, 3, 2, 0, 1],
 [0, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1],
 [1, 2, 3, 0, 3, 2, 1, 0],
 [2, 1, 3, 0, 3, 1, 2, 0]]

Taking this whole list as a population and each sublist inside as an individual, like this example: Population scheme

I need to create a function that will read the individuals and randomly mutate one of the chromosomes with a certain probability, taking into consideration that the numbers in the list can be only in this 0-3 range.

Would anyone know any method, or whatever approach to start developing this? I am completely lost and don't know where to begin, everything I tried has failed, so I am looking for suggestion how would one do it.

Answer 1

from random import randint, uniform;

def mutateIndividual(ind):
     if uniform(0,1) < prob: # random probability of mutation
         mutationIndex = randint(0, len(ind)) # select one chromosome
         ind[mutationIndex] = randint(0,3) # mutate
     return ind;

for i in range(0, len(population)): # outer loop on each individual
     population[i] = mutateIndividual(population[i]);

Exercise: You may want to modify the program to mutate a chromosome to something different than what it already is.