Question

Suppose I have a FruitDetector class which takes in a string and returns the possible types of fruit with different probabilities as a hash:

type = {
  banana: 0.2,
  lemon: 0.4,
  orange: 0.4
}

What would be the cleanest, most idiomatic way to select one random element from the N maximal values in the hash (in this case, to randomly select between lemon and orange), returning the name of the fruit?

Answer 1

The cleanest way is to do it step by step:

# determine maximum weight
maxw = type.values.max

# select items with maximum weight
selection = type.select{|item, weight| weight == maxw}

# choose random item from selection
p selection.keys.sample