Combinations from 2 lists: speed trials

This post was inspired by a recently published scientific paper describing how Python was used to build a list of a million scientific names. Each name was composed of parts taken from a list, and combinations of those parts were generated. The result was something like a Cartesian product, about which I’ve blogged before. This time I was interested in performance: how does the time required to get a result vary with the number of combinations to be built?