Deterministic random number sequence

Question

I have an array of lights that I need to sample from randomly, but deterministically so that all the lights are sampled. Currently I use random numbers to pick a light, and then put processed lights into another list, but I'm wondering if there is a way to use something like a hammersly or halton sequence to do this instead. A biased solution would be ok.

Answer 1

If I understand this, the sequence:
1,2,3,4
could end up as:
3,2,4,1 or 1,3,2,4 or whatever?

Fisher-Yates Shuffle, or the Knuth Shuffle came up on wikipedia. It says linear time, which is good.

import random

def shuffle(x):
    for i in reversed(range(1, len(x))):
        # pick an element in x[:i+1] with which to exchange x[i]
        j = random.randrange(i+1)
        x[i], x[j] = x[j], x[i]