Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today.
This problem was asked by Bloomberg.
There are N prisoners standing in a circle, waiting to be executed. The executions are carried out starting with the kth person, and removing every successive kth person going clockwise until there is no one left.
Given N and k, write an algorithm to determine where a prisoner should stand in order to be the last survivor.
For example, if N = 5 and k = 2, the order of executions would be [2, 4, 1, 5, 3], so you should return 3.
vaskoz
commented
5 years ago
Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today.
This problem was asked by Bloomberg.
There are N prisoners standing in a circle, waiting to be executed. The executions are carried out starting with the kth person, and removing every successive kth person going clockwise until there is no one left.
Given N and k, write an algorithm to determine where a prisoner should stand in order to be the last survivor.
For example, if N = 5 and k = 2, the order of executions would be [2, 4, 1, 5, 3], so you should return 3.
Bonus: Find an O(log N) solution if k = 2.