Advent of Code

Solved today in the same way I was taught years ago

[Spoiler]popping equations off the side which has the human in, inverting them and putting them on the other side until no puzzles are left[/spoiler]

really easy today I found. just a case of chunking through the problem space. I almost assumed my initial approach (brute force) for part 2 wouldn’t work but it was fine!

Just a lot of fiddly code yesterday, didn’t enjoy it.

Today’s was nice and straight forward, though.

Yesterday’s ended up involving drawing shapes on paper and cutting it out. I was convinced I’d find some way of programatically defining the transitions over the edges but ended up just hard-coding the 14 different transitions of my input. Pleased when it worked but not really fun.

Todays was easy enough. I suspect there might be something clever way to do it but my laptop churned through my naive code (with some hideous inefficiencies that I kept thinking “I’ll come back and sort in part 2 when I need it to be faster”) in less than half a second. I’ll leave it there and get on with some proper work.

Part 2 was trivial in mine – I just changed my for loop to execute for ever and added a “if (proposedMoves.isEmpty()){break;}” statement instead.

I’m still waiting for something to cause the levels of pain that the scanners/beacons did last time. That hurt my brain.

Yesterday’s ended up involving drawing shapes on paper and cutting it out.

Yeah, I ended up writing numbers on the sides of a puzzle book (hacked most of it together on a plane, that’s what I had a available) to work out the relationships.

State-of-the-art here… I even drew the shape in Omnigraffle to cut out.

yeah I also had a cut out cube 🙂

today was quite simple after all the practice

Spoiler for

i used a breadth first search storing the hash of the grid state + move to avoid re-searching existing moves

Yup – simple enough today. Quite a relief that I could just add an outer loop to handle part 2. That was unexpectedly easy.

Spoiler for

Well it was after I realised I’d been lazy in part 1 and thought we’ll have no need to check possible steps from the Exit location so don’t worry if we try to move to the row below the grid.

I was getting ready to have to store a big cache of states and positions – I think the states repeat every width x height minutes but both solutions run in <1s so I settled for my simple implementation.

Who’s helping the elves out this year?

Nice easy start this year – though I’m being lazy and sticking to my comfy place in Java. Every year I think I’ll try to learn something new (Rust, Python,…) but never have the time.

Yes, I’m in again. Sticking with Go – I’d like to try a new language, but it’s not even like I get to spend much time in the languages I do know lately!

Perhaps this will be a good way to see how Chat GPT generates code?

Perhaps this will be a good way to see how Chat GPT generates code?

That was so last year :p

Another year, another AoC adventure.

How’s it going this year? So far, a nice gentle easing back into the way of it. Today is an exercise in “read the rules” as I jumped in before I’d read them all.. a couple of wrong answers before I went back and actually read them.. ah, we need to all be in the same direction.. etc.

I suspect it won’t be long before it won’t be doable over a cup of coffee before work. (By me anyway).

I just read today’s. I’ve not started yet, but it’s one of my favourite types of Advent of Code problem. Yay.

Agreed, I enjoy this kind of problem. I’ve got part 1 done but work is getting in the way and I’ll not get a chance to play on part 2 until later tonight. Very nerdy, but I’m looking forward to getting stuck in. A couple of ideas how I might do it..

There is a STW AoC leaderboard if you’re interested – or maybe you’re on it. (I’m not sure who set it up – I think I joined a couple of years ago). If you want, PM me and I’ll try to work out what’s needed to join it.

It’s back on page 2 – posted by @haloric – leaderboard code is: 502307-275d7a99

I got a notification !.
I don’t use STW any more – feel free to start a new leaderboard or use the existing one to your hearts content.

cheers.

Always fancied trying this and actually giving it a go this year. A bit late but started a bit last night and halfway through day 2 so far… so far so easy, I assume it gets a lot harder!

Anyway it should be a fun challenge, let’s see if I can manage it. Only really posting here for motivation so I actually do it and don’t procrastinate into oblivion :-p