Puzzler Solution: Prisoners and Hats and a Jungle

Can’t believe it’s been 2 months since I posted the puzzle. I’ve been involved in test automation using Selenium WebDriver over last couple of months and it has been a great experience designing and coding the test suite. The 1st step is complete - smoke tests for 2 of our applications have been automated and can be run on different browsers concurrently. Now we’re moving to the next steps (which are still TBD). I have lots of ideas in my head but I have to evaluate their feasibility and to break them into different phases so we can realize the added value as we continue to improve the automation suite.

Back to the puzzler solution. For reference, here is the puzzle statement and the code. My implementation of the guessStrategy method is below.

The strategy is that the 1st person to guess speaks the color of the odd hats ahead. So if the (number of black hats ahead) % 2 == 0, the guess is “Black” (lines 4-8). How does it help that person? It doesn’t, that prisoner is unlucky enough to be the 1st one to guess (end of the line) and has a 50% chance. But the rest of the prisoners can guess the color of their hat correctly now that they know the initial guess, all guesses since then and the color of hats ahead. So for example, if the 1st prisoner guesses black, there must be odd black hats ahead. Now if the 2nd prisoner sees odd black hats ahead, s/he must be wearing a white hat because the previous prisoner also saw odd black hats. And the logic goes on like that…if the nth prisoner sees odd number of black hats, and previously, odd number of people have guessed black, then s/he must be wearing a white hat (lines 13-23).

   1: public static char guessStrategy(String prevGuesses, String remArr) {

2: int numB = getNumOfChars(remArr, 'B');

3: int numPrevB;

4: if (prevGuesses.length() == 0) { // initial guess

5: if (numB % 2 == 0)

6: return 'W'; // if B is even, return W

7: else

8: return 'B'; // else return B

9: } else {

10: // strategy: if previously even number of people have said black,

11: // and I see even black hats, I have a white hat, else black

12: numPrevB = getNumOfChars(prevGuesses, 'B');

13: if (numPrevB % 2 == 0) {

14: if (numB % 2 == 0)

15: return 'W';

16: else

17: return 'B';

18: } else {

19: if (numB % 2 == 0)

20: return 'B';

21: else

22: return 'W';

23: }

24: }

25: }

26: 

27: /**

28: * @param arr

29: * @param ch

30: * @return number of times the specified char appears in the array

31: */

32: public static int getNumOfChars(String arr, char ch) {

33: int num = 0;

34: for (int i = 0; i < arr.length(); i++) {

35: if (arr.charAt(i) == ch)

36: num++;

37: }

38: return num;

39: }