Randomize Floor Plates Throughout a Tower

I'm pretty new to Grasshopper, so this solution may (or may not) be simple:

I need to generate random patterns for a tower scheme that I'm working on. The design contains four floor plates and I want to stack them in a random pattern, without any repeating plates next to one another. A 'handmade' example is attached. I would like to generate the 'randomness' parametrically so I can crank out a bunch of iterations quickly.

What's the quickest and simplest way to go about this? I've attempted it in Grasshopper (screenshot attached) but can't figure out how to filter the lists to specify which floors get which plate. I'm also not sure about how to build in the rule that will prevent adjacent floor plates from ending up the same.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Attachments:

A.jpg, 127 KB
2013-09-07 22_06_12-.png, 141 KB

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on September 8, 2013 at 2:03am

...without any repeating plates next to one another.

That is the hard bit. You may just have to accept that it sometimes happens for certain random seeds. Which means you'll need to pick your random seed carefully.

There's one thing I don't understand though, are you just looking to create a series of randomly picked floor-plates, or is each floor composed of the intersection of 4 different floor plates? If it's the former then you actually can ensure uniqueness. The trick is to generate a much longer list of random indices for your floor plates and then to remove consecutive identical numbers: