Predicting the outcome of eenie meenie miney mo ... you are not it!

eeniemeenie.R

## Eenie meenie miney mo,
## Catch a tiger by its toe
## If it hollers let it go,
## eenie meenie miney mo.
## My mom says that
## you are not it.

## The poem is 24 beats long (4 counts per line, 6 lines).

## The aim of the poem is to eliminate people from consideration as "it".

## Given n kids, you have to run the poem n-1 times on progressively shorter
## vectors of kids to find "it". The start position for the count is the person
## after the one who is "not it" each time.

## The question is who is "it".

## First letter of names of the eight girls in the Sisters Eight
## sisterseight<-c("A","D","G","J","M","P","R","Z")
## maybeit<-sisterseight

## princesses<-c("b","j","sw","c","aurora","t","a")
## maybeit<-princesses

findIt<-function(players){
  maybeit<-players
  notit<-vector(length=length(players)-1)
  for(i in 1:(length(players)-1)){ 
      ## while(length(maybeit)>1){
      ## replicate the player list to length 24. The 24th person is "not it"
      notit[i]<-rep(maybeit,ceiling(24/length(maybeit)))[24]
      maybeit<-maybeit[maybeit!=notit]
      message(notit, " is not it. But, ", paste(maybeit,sep=",",collapse=" "), " could be it." )
}
  message(maybeit," is it!")
  return(maybeit)
}

c(seq(which(princesses=="c")+1,length(princesses)),1:length(princesses))[1:length(princesses)]

## Belle first and Belle wins
## If we have seven princesses, then the first one is always it
findIt(c("belle","jasmin","snow","cinderella","aurora","tiana","ariel"))

## Now with six princesses
findIt(c("aurora","tiana","jasmin","snow","cinderella","ariel"))

findIt(c("tiana","jasmin","snow","cinderella","ariel"))

findIt(c("jasmin","snow","cinderella","ariel"))