RMGiroux

Background for the rude_flier puzzle

Puzzle is posed at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-someone-be-sitting-in-your-seat-on-the-plane/

See https://gist.github.com/RMGiroux/af436bed97ceb7b1f759 for perl implementation

Empirical results

Running my script shows the result is very close to 50% regardless of the plane size.

RMGiroux

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# Simulate the "will you get your seat on a plane if a rude passenger
# picks a seat at random at the start of boarding" puzzle posed here:
#    http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/will-someone-be-sitting-in-your-seat-on-the-plane/

# My spoilery attempt to explain the unexpected result this script generates is at
#   https://gist.github.com/RMGiroux/dd8856e68dd0ed5f3064

use strict;

RMGiroux

// Copyright 2015, Mike Giroux
// Licensed under Apache License 2.0 : http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
// Permission is explicitly granted to aggregate this solution with any other
// solutions to the Regehr Nibble-sort Challenge (http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1213) 
// for benchmarking or pedagogical purposes, or any other purposes allowed by AL2.0.

unsigned long nibble_sort_word(unsigned long word) {
    char          nibble_counts[16] = {0};
    unsigned long result = 0;
    unsigned char nibble_index = 15;