Looks very similar to my solution. My idea was that the bad shuffle might end up moving too many items back to the left, so I counted how many were in their original position or left. This should be around 500 for a proper shuffle. It worked, although it turned out that my instinct was backwards. I tested and came up with a cutoff value of 486 which predicted the correct answer with about 95% accuracy. This means that more items were actually to the right of their initial position in the bad shuffle.
The solution you posted looks like it does it the other way around - counts those that are to the right of their original position (5 or more positions) and then uses a cutoff of 508. I feel like any quick and dirty measure of shuffle quality like this should be workable and avoids the need for difficult probability calculations. Sam. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Code Jam" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-code/885dc492-f0a2-4fbe-a564-dddfd2b47472%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
