Divide set into subsets with equal number of elements
In case you are still interested in the exhaustive search question. You have 240 choose 80 possibilities to choose the first set and then another 160 choose 80 for the second set, at which point the third set is fixed. In total, this gives you:
120554865392512357302183080835497490140793598233424724482217950647 * 92045125813734238026462263037378063990076729140
Clearly, this is not an option :)
For the purpose of conducting a psychological experiment I have to divide a set of pictures (240) described by 4 features (real numbers) into 3 subsets with equal number of elements in each subset (240/3 = 80) in such a way that all subsets are approximately balanced with respect to these features (in terms of mean and standard deviation).
Can anybody suggest an algorithm to automate that? Are there any packages/modules in Python or R that I could use to do that? Where should I start?