Java Glossary : permutation

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permutation

If you take a set of objects and rearrange the order without taking any away or adding any, that is a permutation of the orginal set of objects. Permutations care about order where combinations do not. If you have n objects there are n! possible permutations of them. For code to generate them all see the Dijkstra algorithm.

A Discipline of Programming

0-13-215871-X

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra

See page 71 for the permutations algorithm.

For example, the 3! = 6 permutations of three objects a, b and c are:

a	b	c
a	c	b
b	a	c
b	c	a
c	a	b
c	b	a

combinations ¤ factorial ¤ shuffle

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