Linear Prisoners (Solution)

Surprisingly, 9.5 of them, on average, can survive, and 9 will definitely survive.

The prisoner in the back of the line, who has to guess the color of his hat first, can’t do better than random. There’s no information available to him, so any guess is as good as any other. Given that, his only goal is to transfer as much information possible to the rest of the prisoners with his guess.

What he can do is guess white if the number of white hats that he sees (i.e. all hats except his own) is even and guess black if the number of white hats that he sees is odd.

Then, we come to the next prisoner in line. He can see whether the number of white hats in front of him is even or odd. He also knows whether the number of white hats in front of him plus his own hat (if white) is even or odd from the last prisoner’s guess. From that, he can deduce with certainty whether or not his hat is white.

Moving on to the next prisoner, the logic is exactly the same.

So, all every prisoner can correctly the color of their own hat except for the prisoner in the back of the line whose chance of being right is random (50%). That comes to 9.5 out of 10 prisoners, on average.