strategy puzzles
medium | strategy |
N people team up and decide on a strategy for playing this game. Then they walk into a room. On entry to the room, each person is given a hat on which one of the first N natural numbers is written. There may be duplicate hat numbers. For example, for N=3, the 3 team members may get hats labeled 2, 0, 2. Each person can see the numbers written on the others' hats, but does not know the number written on his own hat. Every person then simultaneously guesses the number of his own hat. What strategy can the team follow to make sure that at least one person on the team guesses his hat number correctly?
Modulo?
Let the persons be numbered 0 to N-1. The i-th person should announce 1 + (i-s)mod N, where s is the sum of numbers he sees. With this strategy, if the sum of all N numbers equals 1 + (m mod N), then the m-th gnome is guaranteed to announce the number of his own hat!