I have the following problem. I need to compute the permutations of a set; however, the set may contain two elements which are the same and therefore cause repeated permutations. For example:
Given the set [ 0 0 1 2 ], the permutations include these possibilities:
1 2 0 0
1 2 0 0
However, I would like to avoid identical permutations such as these. In MATLAB I can simply do this:
unique(perms([ 0 0 1 2 ]), 'rows')
But the problem here is efficiency - I am doing this repeatedly in a huge for loop and the sorting required by unique is too slow. So my question is: can I compute unique permutations of this nature directly without having to loop through the result afterwards? I am working in MATLAB but just a general solution would probably be helpful, although something which can be vectorized in MATLAB would probably be ideal!
As far as I can see existing questions do not cover exactly this problem, but apologies if this has been answered before.