How can I get a weighted random pick from Python's Counter class?

Question

I have a program where I\'m keeping track of the success of various things using collections.Counter — each success of a thing increments the corr

Answer 1

You could wrap the iterator in list() to convert it into a list for random.choice():

nextthing = random.choice(list(scoreboard.elements()))

The downside here is that this expands the list in memory, rather than accessing it item-by-item as would normally get with an iterator.

If you wanted to solve this iteratively, this algorithm is probably a good choice.