The Game of Master Mind is played as follows:
The computer has four slots containing balls that are red (R), yellow (Y), green (G) or blue (B).For example, the computer might have RGGB (e.g., Slot #1 is red, Slots #2 and #3 are green, Slot #4 is blue).
You, the user, are trying to guess the solution.You might, for example, guess YRGB.
When you guess the correct color for the correct slot, you get a “hit”.If you guess a color that exists but is in the wrong slot, you get a “pseudo-hit”.For example, the guess YRGB has 2 hits and one pseudo hit.
For each guess, you are told the number of hits and pseudo-hits.
Write a method that, given a guess and a solution, returns the number of hits and pseudo hits.
This problem is from Cracking the Coding interview. The book provides a very neat solution (shown below), except there is a bug in it. Consider a case where solution is "RGGB" and the guess is "GGGR", the code should return 2 hits and 1 pseudo hits, however, the solution gives us 2 hits and 2 pseudo hits. The reason is that the solution_mask only takes into account if there exists such character in the solution, so for the first "G", of course there exists another 2 Gs in the solution, but not in the correct position. However, in real time, we should taken into account the number of duplicate characters in the solution and the guess. I use a hashmap. My solution does need extra space. But since we only need at most 4 key, value pairs, it won't take too much extra space.
The solution provided by the book:
public static class Result {
public int hits;
public int pseudoHits;
};
public static Result estimate(String guess, String solution) {
Result res = new Result();
int solution_mask = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) {
solution_mask |= 1 << (1 + solution.charAt(i) - ‘A’);
}
for (int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) {
if (guess.charAt(i) == solution.charAt(i)) {
++res.hits;
} else if ((solution_mask &
(1 << (1 + guess.charAt(i) - ‘A’))) >= 1) {
++res.pseudoHits;
}
}
return res;
}
My solution:
import java.util.*;
public class GameofMaster {
private static class Result{
public int hits;
public int pseudoHits;
public Result(int hits, int pseudoHits){
this.hits = hits;
this.pseudoHits = pseudoHits;
}
public String toString(){
return "hits: " + String.valueOf(hits) + "; pseudoHits: " + String.valueOf(pseudoHits);
}
}
public static Result estimate(String guess, String solution){
Map map = new HashMap();
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++){
char c = solution.charAt(i);
if (!map.containsKey(c))
map.put(c, 1);
else
map.put(c, map.get(c) + 1);
}
int hits = 0;
int pse = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++){
char c = guess.charAt(i);
if (c == solution.charAt(i)){
hits++;
if (!map.containsKey(c)) {
pse--;
continue;
}
map.put(c, map.get(c) - 1);
if (map.get(c) == 0)
map.remove(c);
}
else if (map.containsKey(c)) {
pse++;
map.put(c, map.get(c) - 1);
if (map.get(c) == 0)
map.remove(c);
}
}
return new Result(hits, pse);
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(estimate("RGGB", "RGGB").toString());
}
}
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