Puzzles
From raju
The crazy Sword game
Q. 100 people standing in a circle in an order 1 to 100. No.1 has a sword. He kills the next person (i.e.no. 2) and gives the sword to the next (i.e no.3). All people do the same until only 1 survives. Which number survives at the last?
A. 73
Here is an octave code that solves it
#! /usr/bin/octave -qf 1; function [survivors, new_sword_index] = kill_round(people, sword_index) n_people = length(people); survivors = people(sword_index:2:end); n_survivors = length(survivors); if (mod(length(people)-sword_index+1,2) == 1) new_sword_index = 2; else new_sword_index = 1; endif endfunction function [winner] = sword_game(N) a = [1:N]; sword_index = 1; while (length(a) > 1) [a, sword_index] = kill_round(a, sword_index); endwhile winner = a; endfunction
Run it as follows
rajulocal@hogwarts:~/work/puzzles$ octave -qf octave:1> crazy_sword octave:2> winner = sword_game(100) winner = 73
Tested using octave 3.8.2 on a machine running a combination of Debian Lenny (stable) and Jessie (testing).