Mathematical Combinations
The combination formula is this…
with n being the number of items available to you and k the number of items you can pick at one time (where order does not matter).
In other words, if n = 4 (a,b,c,d), and k = 2, it means that we have four items to choose from, and we can only choose two at a time. So the different combinations would be…
a b a c a d b c b d c d
Because order does not matter (a b
is the same thing as b a
) we have a total of 6 possible unique combinations.
Factorials in Python
To calculate the number of combinations we need to use factorials (the ! symbol).
Factorials work like this…
3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 5! = 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 120 ... and so on.
In python, factorials can be found in the math
module
from math import factorial
…and can be used like this.
>>> factorial(6) 720
Python Combination Function
the function looks like this
def combination(n,k): numerator=factorial(n) denominator=(factorial(k)*factorial(n-k)) answer=numerator/denominator return answer
So if we run the function with the above example (n=4 and k=2), we should get the right answer.
>>> combination(4,2) 6
DONE!