| Description |
NCHOOSE - all combinations of the elements of a set
W = nchoose(S) returns all possible combinations of one or more
elements of the set S. In total there are 2^N-1 combinations, where N
is the number of elements in S. W is a cell array: each cell holds one
of these combination (as a row vector). S can be a cell array of
strings, and each cell of W will then contain a cell array of strings.
Example:
nchoose([2 4 6 8])
% -> { [2] ;
% [4] ;
% [2 4] ;
% [6] ;
% ...
% [2 6 8] ;
% [4 6 8] ;
% [2 4 6 8]} ; % in total (2^4)-1 = 15 different combinations
Notes:
- For sets containing more than 18 elements a warning is given, as this
can take some time. On my PC, a set of 20 elements took 20 seconds. Hit Ctrl-C to intterupt calculations.
- If S contain non-unique elements (e.g. S = [1 1 2]), NCHOOSE will return non-unique cells. In other words, NCHOOSE treats all elements of S as being unique. One could use NCHOOSE(UNIQUE(S)) to avoid that.
- Loosely speaking, NCHOOSE(S) collects all output of multiple calls to NCHOOSEK(S,K) where K is looping from 1 to the number of elements of S. The implementation of NCHOOSE, however, does rely of a different method and is much faster than such a loop.
- By adding an empty cell to the output, the power set of a cell array
is formed:
S = {1 ; 'hello' ; { 1 2 3}}
PowerS = nchoose(S)
PowerS(end+1) = {[]}
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_set
See also NCHOOSEK, PERMS
and COMBN, ALLCOMB on the File Exchange
(version 2.1, mar 2010) |
