Even odd problem in guise of such a long badly worded text.

This problem is a glaring example of what is wrong with programming interviews.

Was this testing my ability to break down a problem and solve it? To engineer an effective and maintainable solution? To utilize algorithms and data structures effectively?

No, it's testing my ability to sift through bull**** and find the two little details that make it trivial. I get that checking for requirements is important, but when doing that on a job I am not doing so in some abstract arbitrary void - there is context that helps me filter the infinite possibilites into a workable set. I have ADD and one aspect of that which really affects me is in how I'm able to filter information. I need context, or if new to a context - collaboration.

This seemed like another disembodied and contrived math-olympiad-type "here's a game with arbitrary rules no one would ever actually play, who wins?" - the description has so many details. So many that even though I read that each tower is of m height, that got dilluted and lost while taking in the rest of the info and then I had it in my head that I was dealing with towers each with their own size. It might actually be a game that's non-deterministic (aka would make sense to "play") if that was the case - at least in so far as you'd have to be able to find a tower that's not a prime number and if you can't (which could include not recognizing it) then you lose. But nope, it's arbitrary contrived bull**** that no one in the real world would actually ever do.

Why is this what gates acquisition at many tech companies? I have a decade of professional experience and this does not represent a SINGLE THING I'VE DONE EVER. If this were in a timed test for an interview (and I've had similar that were) then I would absolutely bomb it - it'd likely take me the whole time alotted just to understand what's actually being asked given its contrived two grains of wheat in a mountain of chaff description. Thanks for making job searching hell Hackerrank.

I doubt using these contrived "do 1000 of these problems until you can read the mind of whoever is writing them and see all their bull**** patterns" as a primary filter for working at most major tech companies that have vast influence over the world and is a great thing either. Just look at the psychopathic gold rush fever to automate plagiarism and deception (marketing term: "AI"), but that's a conversation for somewhere else.

TL;DR - This sort of question is insane and a complete waste of time and energy and disrespectful to the people actually trying to work an improve. Especially when mixed in with other "easy" problems that do require parsing a mountain of text that IS all relevant.

I forgot to mention above but the 2nd "grain of wheat" was that the towers could be reduced to size 1. Like it's CLEARLY trying to trick you otherwise it'd say that directly or that you remove the tower or something equivalent instead of the evenly dividing smokescreen.

Wow this problem was beyond bad. What a wierd question and such a poor explaination.

My Java 8 Solution

public static int towerBreakers(int n, int m) {
        if (m == 1) {
            return 2;
        }
        
        if (n % 2 == 0) {
            return 2;
        } else {
            return 1;
        }
    }

Well, this was an 'interesting' problem. My 100% solution was a single line of code :-D