permutations with unique values

Question

itertools.permutations generates where its elements are treated as unique based on their position, not on their value. So basically I want to avoid duplicates like this:

Answer 1

The best solution to this problem I have seen uses Knuth's "Algorithm L" (as noted previously by Gerrat in the comments to the original post):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12836385/how-can-i-interleave-or-create-unique-permutations-of-two-stings-without-recurs/12837695

Some timings:

Sorting [1]*12+[0]*12 (2,704,156 unique permutations):
Algorithm L → 2.43 s
Luke Rahne's solution → 8.56 s
scipy.multiset_permutations() → 16.8 s