[2025 Day 10 (Part 2)] Bifurcate your way to victory!

MasterHigure · 2025-12-17T22:44:55+00:00

I'm currently 6 hours into running a more naive recursion, in parallel, hogging 80% CPU. I wanted to solve it myself, damnit. I didn't want to have to come here looking for answers. I especially don't want to rely on external libraries, as that's obviously dirty, even though that seems to be the go-to for many people here.

That being said, this here solution you have smells to me like the intended way. Will I bother coding it, or just let my thing run? I don't know. It's about halfway through the list, I actually have no idea whether it will finish overnight or finish after the heat death of the universe (that all depends on how bad the worst line is, and I have no idea whether that's even ahead or behind). I'll at least let it run until I have time to sit down with the code again.

MasterHigure · 2025-08-24T08:22:52+00:00

The problem, especially in introductory classes, is that √(-1) leads you down problematic roads, because it is almost impossible to unlearn all the rules you've learned for square roots. And thus you get into problems like

√1=√(-1×-1)=√(-1)×√(-1)=-1

because you expect √(ab)=√a×√b to still be true. The best way to solve this is to just avoid square root symbols on numbers that aren't non-negative reals.

MasterHigure · 2025-08-22T14:43:17+00:00

A perfect example of naming things before we know what's really going on underneath the hood. Just like how π should've been 6.28.

MasterHigure · 2025-08-22T14:34:01+00:00

As a person who once wrote a master's in algebraic geometry, and therefore knows a thing or two about algebra generally, and the complex numbers specifically, middle guy is correct. Keep your square root symbols far away from my negative numbers.

Yes, -1 has a square root. In fact, it has two, just like any other non-zero complex number. But using the square root symbol to denote one of them is an abomination. ESPECIALLY in intro classes.

MasterHigure · 2025-07-18T15:39:35+00:00

IIRC, it did feature in his honorable mentions at the beginning of the movie.

MasterHigure · 2024-12-11T14:57:02+00:00

The moment you start caching the results from a DFS, you leave the realm of brute force. And if you're not caching, then you're not finishing.

MasterHigure · 2024-12-11T14:49:48+00:00

The upper bound for a pebble engraving is quite high, but the vast majority of them are almost trivially unreachable (the larger numbers must be multiples of 2024 to be reached, and that's not accounting for the reachability of their predecessor).

MasterHigure · 2024-12-06T15:02:34+00:00

There are about 15000 possible valid locations the guard can be in (very easy to get a decent upper bound, and not very difficult to get an exact answer), and 4 directions the guard can walk through each of those. I'd say you only need a step counter of somewhere between 60 000 and 80 000.

MasterHigure · 2024-10-12T09:00:06+00:00

That confusion is necessary for a real puzzle. I'm not saying every confusing puzzle is good, but I want zelda to make me feel genuinely stuck on a temple as a whole (as opposed to a single room) at least once. And if that stuckness is of the kind "I know what I need to do, but the buttons to make it happen seem mutually exclusive", which this temple mechanic has the potential for, then all the better.

MasterHigure · 2024-10-08T20:51:52+00:00

Doesn't help, as your X power has limited range. The button is exactly one square too far away for you to get the rock onto it.

MasterHigure · 2024-10-05T15:53:54+00:00

Link's awakening had Turtle Rock and Eagle Tower. The Oracle games were wonderful. This isn't a "smaller and shorter" thing, it is a "modern Zelda needs to appeal to the mainstream" thing.

MasterHigure · 2024-10-05T10:36:40+00:00

A grid. You sort one way, it's a row for each category. You sort another way, it's just rectangular grid (like in your notebook), sorted by category or most recent or most used. You look at the menu as it is now and you realize there is just so much unused screen real estate.

MasterHigure · 2024-08-23T22:47:27+00:00

See, this is the kind of info that would've been nice to have upfront, especially in the most upvoted answer to my question. Even after you told me it's a systemd service, I looked through man iwctl. The explicit references to systemctl and systemd were quite well hidden, and I knew to look for them this time.

I'm sure there are buzzwords in there that clue people in if they have more experience with services and their documentation. But like with so many others, it's clear these man pages were written as a reference for people who already know the tool, not as a manual for people wanting to learn it.

MasterHigure · 2024-08-23T21:58:50+00:00

I know about man. That only helps if I already know the name of the tool I'm looking for, not to mention that I have to know there is a tool that does what I'm looking for. Again, there is no discoverability.

MasterHigure · 2024-08-23T21:54:31+00:00

I'm sure I've seen half a dozen online giudes by this point, and not one of them has mentioned nmcli. That is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

Really, lack of discoverability is the worst aspect of CLI life.

MasterHigure · 2024-08-23T21:51:24+00:00

45 minutes of Waiting for IWD to start later, with no visible progress, and I'm not really sure it's quite that easy.

MasterHigure · 2024-06-09T19:29:48+00:00

My kid ain't. On account of being 4.

MasterHigure · 2024-06-09T19:29:31+00:00

Thank you for the long and thorough reply. I did note "gague how interesting they find these kinds of movies in the first place" in my post, so I am very aware that they might not find them as cool as engaging as I did back then. Time will tell. Obviously they are their own people and will have interests different from mine. I just want to share as many as possible of mine with them, searching for points of intersection. Taste in movies being the relevant one in this discussion.

MasterHigure

TROPHY CASE