I have a vector containing 15 values and would like to find all the possible ways to partition the vector into 3 equally sized partitions. I know there is n!/(n-r)!r! combinations to take r values out of a list of n values with replacement & this is easily generated with itertools in Python.
Does there exist an easy solution to list all combinations in this case as well?
Mathematically there will be n!/((n/3!)^3)/3! solutions, for example if n=15 there will be 126126 combinations and if n=6 there will be 15 combinations.
As the task needs to remove duplicates, which is not supported by itertools, I would recommend package more_itertools:
import more_itertools
n = 6
assert n%3 == 0
[x for x in more_itertools.set_partitions(range(n), 3) if len(x[0]) == len(x[1]) == len(x[2])]
[[[0, 1], [2, 3], [4, 5]],
[[0, 1], [3, 4], [2, 5]],
[[0, 1], [2, 4], [3, 5]],
[[1, 2], [0, 3], [4, 5]],
[[0, 2], [1, 3], [4, 5]],
[[1, 2], [3, 4], [0, 5]],
[[0, 2], [3, 4], [1, 5]],
[[1, 2], [0, 4], [3, 5]],
[[0, 2], [1, 4], [3, 5]],
[[2, 3], [1, 4], [0, 5]],
[[2, 3], [0, 4], [1, 5]],
[[1, 3], [2, 4], [0, 5]],
[[0, 3], [2, 4], [1, 5]],
[[1, 3], [0, 4], [2, 5]],
[[0, 3], [1, 4], [2, 5]]]