At a party with N people, each person is identified by a unique number between 1 and N. Each person is also wearing a hat with their number on it. They decide to play a game. Each person passes his or her hat to the person with the next highest number (so person 2 gets hat 1, person 3 gets hat 2, and person 1 gets hat N). The game proceeds from there in rounds; on each round, each person may choose to either keep the hat they currently have, or swap hats with exactly one other person.

What is the minimum number of rounds, as a function of N, that it would take for every person to get their own hat back? Note: each person can see their own hat at any time.

I just tried it on +/- 10 numbers and looked what happened, this is the answer I found:

The number of digits in the binary expression of (N-1)

Posted by Hugo on 2005-02-24 15:21:26