[anonymoushn]

For #2, are the codes unique? Do customers select dishes uniformly at random, without regard to whether they appear to be available? How could an item possibly appear to be unavailable when in fact it is available?

The problem statement makes it seem that the grid presented to the customer is an array of 36 squares, where every square that corresponds to a letter or number that occurs in any index of any possible special (whether it is the special today or not) has been crossed out. How is the customer to deduce anything from this that he or she could not already deduce from the published list of possible specials?

[alexis-d]

I agree, the wording of the second problem is very unclear for me, in particular how the grid works...

[anonymoushn]

I tried solving the version of the problem in which codes are not necessarily unique, the grid an array of 36 squares in which each letter/number contained in any of today's specials has been crossed out, an item "appears" to be available iff all of its letters/numbers have been crossed out, and the customer picks one of the 250 items uniformly at random.

It seems that this is not the correct interpretation of the problem statement.

[rajatsuri]

the first part of q2 assumes that the customer has already picked items that appear to be available

[anonymoushn]

I tried solving the version the problem in which the codes are not necessarily unique, the grid is 1x36, only any character that appears in the code of any item that is a special today is marked, an item "appears to be available" iff all of the characters in its code are marked, and the customer chooses from the items that appear to be available for the first question.

It seems that this is not the correct interpretation of the problem statement.

[anonymoushn]

The version of the problem in which all of the above is true except that the codes must be unique also appears to be the wrong interpretation of the problem statement. I'm sort of inclined to do something else with my time, since this seems to be more of a mind-reading challenge than a programming challenge.