Hi Cavac,

Can I just say I've really enjoyed thinking this one over. Thanks for posting. Now I have already come across this puzzle before and knew what the best option would be. However I have never until now really delved into the math and certainly never tried to apply such a problem into code. I may try and do so with other problems I come across, as an ongoing training technique.

At first I thought I was going to have to use arrays and hashes or a mixture of the two. However after thinking about it and trying to reduce the significance of the array/hash values, and coding, I came up with what I think is a fairly straight forward conditional routine that tests for both the punter sticking and changing after each initial guess.

I made an effort to approach the problem as if I had never seen it before and did not know the outcome already too. I hope that the module retains it's integrity for that

<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

no data structures required I think. Happy Xmas & New Year!

Don

In reply to Re: Holiday parcel puzzle by Don Coyote
in thread Holiday parcel puzzle by cavac

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.