Bulls and Cows
You are playing the following Bulls and Cows game with your friend: You write a 4-digit secret number and ask your friend to guess it, each time your friend guesses a number, you give a hint, the hint tells your friend how many digits are in the correct positions (called “bulls”) and how many digits are in the wrong positions (called “cows”), your friend will use those hints to find out the secret number.
For example:
Secret number: 1807 Friend's guess: 7810Hint:
1
bull and3
cows. (The bull is8
, the cows are0
,1
and7
.)According to Wikipedia: “Bulls and Cows (also known as Cows and Bulls or Pigs and Bulls or Bulls and Cleots) is an old code-breaking mind or paper and pencil game for two or more players, predating the similar commercially marketed board game Mastermind. The numerical version of the game is usually played with 4 digits, but can also be played with 3 or any other number of digits.”
Write a function to return a hint according to the secret number and friend’s guess, use
A
to indicate the bulls andB
to indicate the cows, in the above example, your function should return1A3B
.You may assume that the secret number and your friend’s guess only contain digits, and their lengths are always equal.
Credits:
Special thanks to @jeantimex for adding this problem and creating all test cases.
trivial question, with some corner cases.
The description is ambiguous. We should minimize the digit before A and B.
//how to deal with duplicates? class Solution { public: string getHint(string secret, string guess) { int a = 0; int b = 0; int map[10]; memset(map, 0, sizeof(map)); for(int i = 0; i < secret.size(); i++){ char c = secret[i]; if(c == guess[i]){ a++; }else{ map[c - '0']++; } } for(int i = 0; i < secret.size(); i++){ char c = guess[i]; if(map[c - '0'] > 0 && secret[i] != c){ b++; map[c - '0']--; } } string ans; ans.append(to_string(a)); ans.push_back('A'); ans.append(to_string(b)); ans.push_back('B'); return ans; } };