100 prisoners' problem

[SMcNeill]

Steve your is a Creative solution  but it breaks some rules:

Prisoners enter the room one by one, can open a drawer, inspect the card number in the drawer, then close the drawer.
A prisoner can open no more than 50 drawers.
A prisoner tries to find his own number.
A prisoner finding his own number is then held apart from the others.
If all 100 prisoners find their own numbers then they will all be pardoned. If any don't then all sentences stand.

I guess I was looking at the problem differently than you guys.

I was thinking a prisoner could go in, open one box, read the number, and then close the box.   By opening *no more* than 50 boxes, I assumed he could walk out and try again later.  For example, he could open the first box, walk out, and then have a chance to go back in again later to open another box.  Unless you find your own number, you're put back in with the group of other prisoners.  The rules say you can devise a strategy before anyone enters the room; it doesn't say whether or not they can talk to each other after entering the room.  I was under the assumption that this was one of those "simple solutions that nobody ever thinks about" type problems which was supposed to highlight the value of teamwork.

Kinda like the school teacher who brings a big bag of candy bars to school and divides his students up into pairs to play tic-tac-toe, with the winner of any game getting a candy bar.  A reward to foster true competition!! Most of the class struggles to get a candy bar, except for these two kids over in the corner who end up with a whole stack of them by the time the exercise was over.  Their means of winning so many?  They simply took turns losing to each other, as the rules never stated that the students couldn't work together to get the rewards!

The way this was wrote up reminded me of that -- a simple solution which only required a little working together to defeat the impossible puzzle.  

I wonder what the odds of winning would be if you just had each prisoner open one box until they found their number, and then move on to the next box and repeat until finished.

For example, box #1 would have the number 27 inside...  The first 27 people would all use one opening until they got that value to the right person, and then the next 73 people would all have a 1/99 chance of getting their number on the first try, rather than a 1/100 chance.  If the next number was 83, then they'd get 2 values in one pass, putting them on the road towards success.  No talking involved then, and if the numbers had several sequential sequences in them, winning should be easily doable in 50 passes.