This post is part of a series on Mohammad Anwar’s excellent Weekly Challenge, where hackers submit solutions in Perl, Raku, or any other language, to two different challenges every week. (It’s a lot of fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.)
The second of the challenges this week poses the following question (paraphrased):
Suppose we have 500 doors, and 500 employees. The first employee opens all the doors. The second employee closes every 2nd door (doors 2, 4, 6, … 500). The third employee closes every third door if it is open, or opens it if closed. And so on. Which doors are open after all 500 employees have been through?
I remembered toying with a very similar problem a few years ago. At the time, I actually wrote a terminal-based visualizer for it, which you can see in action below (the animated GIF is 1.7MiB, so it may take a few seconds to load on slower connections):
Continue reading “PWC 046 › Is the Room Open? (500 Doors)”