Introduction

Random ass blog post time! Just had a coding challenge after literally spending hours on a such a remarkably bullshit similar problem fuuuuu pop into my head and wasn’t sure where to put it, so to the blog it goes!

I swear I’ve built my career mostly on being good at googling shit, but this one eluded me and I will not show you my solution. lol. no, sir. Maybe it’s a sign I’m getting older, but that it’s coinciding with el goog becoming markedly worse lately helps me worry less.

people hi

Scenario

For lack of a more apparent example - Imagine, if you will:

You work in the quality assurance department for a great big widget manufacturer. Widgets, as we all know, have 3 holes. Hole “a” can either be open (0) or closed (1). Likewise, hole “b” can either be open (0) or closed (1). Concordantly… ok.

Your shiny new Widget Tester 1000 can operate on a large number of widgets at one time. To start, we’d like to generate the minimum number of test widgets necesary to test each combination of hole configurations, with no repeats.

I don’t know if that holds up, @ me ✌️

Details

Tools

Using whatever means necessary (yes, itertools if you must):

Task

write a routine that takes a list of items (strings, objects, whatever), and returns a list of tuples of combinations of each item, paired with either a 0 or 1, indicating whether the item is “off” or “on”.

Example

input:

[
    "a",
    "b",
    "c"
]

output:

[
    [("a", 0), ("b", 0), ("c", 1)],
    [("a", 0), ("b", 1), ("c", 0)],
    [("a", 0), ("b", 1), ("c", 1)],
    [("a", 1), ("b", 0), ("c", 0)],
    [("a", 1), ("b", 0), ("c", 1)],
    [("a", 1), ("b", 1), ("c", 0)],
    [("a", 1), ("b", 1), ("c", 1)],
]