Save the Prisoner! : HackerRank Solution in Python.

A jail has a number of prisoners and a number of treats to pass out to them. Their jailer decides the fairest way to divide the treats is to seat the prisoners around a circular table in sequentially numbered chairs. A chair number will be drawn from a hat. Beginning with the prisoner in that chair, one candy will be handed to each prisoner sequentially around the table until all have been distributed.

The jailer is playing a little joke, though. The last piece of candy looks like all the others, but it tastes awful. Determine the chair number occupied by the prisoner who will receive that candy.

For example, there are 4 prisoners and 6 pieces of candy. The prisoners arrange themselves in seats numbered 1 to 4. Let’s suppose two is drawn from the hat. Prisoners receive candy at positions 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3. The prisoner to be warned sits in chair number 3.

Function Description

Complete the saveThePrisoner function in the editor below. It should return an integer representing the chair number of the prisoner to warn.

saveThePrisoner has the following parameter(s):

• n: an integer, the number of prisoners
• m: an integer, the number of sweets
• s: an integer, the chair number to begin passing out sweets from

Solution in Python 3.

The prisoner who needs be warned will be obtained from the subtraction of 1 from the sum of the number of sweets to be distributed i.e m and the the chair number from which the jailer begins passing sweets from i.e s (1 is deducted from the aforementioned sum because the jailer distributes from the sweet to the magnitude of s i.e if s = 3 then he begins distributing sweets from 3). We will save the equation in variable ans. Which arithmetically will be :-

ans=s+m-1

Albeit if the number of sweets to be distributed i.e m exceeds the number of prisoners i.e n then the jailer will have to begin the distribution again from 1. Hence, we will need to take the modulus of n from the equation, Thus the equation will become:-

ans=(s+m-1)%n

If the value of ans equals 0 then the prisoner who needs to be saved will be the nth prisoner because if we compute the modulus of the number against itself we get 0.

The complete solution is:-