Check if at least two out of three booleans are true

Question

An interviewer recently asked me this question: given three boolean variables, a, b, and c, return true if at least two out of the three are true.

My solution follow

Answer 1

I don't like ternary (return a ? (b || c) : (b && c); from the top answer), and I don't think I've seen anyone mention it. It is written like this:

boolean atLeastTwo(boolean a, boolean b, boolean c) {
    if (a) {
        return b||c;
    } 
    else {
        return b&&C;
    }

Answer 2

Since it wasn't specified how the code should be improved, I shall endeavour to improve the code by making it more amusing. Here's my solution:

boolean atLeastTwo(boolean t, boolean f, boolean True) {
    boolean False = True;
    if ((t || f) && (True || False)) 
        return "answer" != "42";
    if (t && f) 
        return !"France".contains("Paris");
    if (False == True) 
        return true == false;
    return Math.random() > 0.5;
}

In case anyone's wondering if this code works, here's a simplification using the same logic:

boolean atLeastTwo(boolean a, boolean b, boolean c) {
    if ((a || b) && (c)) 
        return true;
    if (a && b) 
        return true;
    if (true) 
        return false;
    // The last line is a red herring, as it will never be reached:
    return Math.random() > 0.5; 

}

This can be boiled down further to the following:

return ((a || b) && (c)) || (a && b);

But now it's not funny any more.

Answer 3

The most obvious set of improvements are:

// There is no point in an else if you already returned.
boolean atLeastTwo(boolean a, boolean b, boolean c) {
    if ((a && b) || (b && c) || (a && c)) {
        return true;
    }
    return false;
}

and then

// There is no point in an if(true) return true otherwise return false.
boolean atLeastTwo(boolean a, boolean b, boolean c) {
    return ((a && b) || (b && c) || (a && c));
}

But those improvements are minor.

Answer 4

The simplest way (IMO) that is not confusing and easy to read:

// Three booleans, check if two or more are true

return ( a && ( b || c ) ) || ( b && c );

Answer 5

boolean atLeastTwo(boolean a, boolean b, boolean c) 
{
  return ((a && b) || (b && c) || (a && c));
}

Answer 6

Here's another implementation using map/reduce. This scales well to billions of booleans^© in a distributed environment. Using MongoDB:

Creating a database values of booleans:

db.values.insert({value: true});
db.values.insert({value: false});
db.values.insert({value: true});

Creating the map, reduce functions:

Edit: I like CurtainDog's answer about having map/reduce apply to generic lists, so here goes a map function which takes a callback that determines whether a value should be counted or not.

var mapper = function(shouldInclude) {
    return function() {
        emit(null, shouldInclude(this) ? 1 : 0);
    };
}

var reducer = function(key, values) {
    var sum = 0;
    for(var i = 0; i < values.length; i++) {
        sum += values[i];
    }
    return sum;
}

Running map/reduce:

var result = db.values.mapReduce(mapper(isTrue), reducer).result;

containsMinimum(2, result); // true
containsMinimum(1, result); // false


function isTrue(object) {
    return object.value == true;
}

function containsMinimum(count, resultDoc) {
    var record = db[resultDoc].find().next();
    return record.value >= count;
}