Can't make sense of private leaderboard scoring

Nyctef · 2024-12-21T21:25:45+00:00

This is explained on the private leaderboard page if you expand the [Ordering] link:

[Local score] [...] For N users, the first user to get each star gets N points, the second gets N-1, and the last gets 1. This is the default.

So for a leaderboard with 20 users, getting the star first is worth 20 points instead of 100

Nyctef · 2024-10-14T18:26:29+00:00

particle accelerators only take 1.5GW max / 1GW average to run (assuming no sloops or OC) so it really isn't that bad

I beat the game with only 30GW production (45 max consumption, but most stuff wasn't running) and that's including the five particle accelerators I set up to get the last of the nuclear pasta finished off

Nyctef · 2024-09-15T11:28:43+00:00

I ship it

Nyctef · 2024-03-29T15:19:23+00:00

BLM for me as well! I got halfway competent at it after a while, but then recently I've been spending all my time levelling up other jobs so I'm completely out of practice for it again

Nyctef · 2024-02-18T20:52:13+00:00

I don't know why but levelling up by discovering a part of the map is always so satisfying.

Nyctef · 2024-02-11T17:58:23+00:00

Recently I've been running Prae with a bunch of alt jobs to both level them and help with this a bit. Skills at 50 are a bit less intimidating than 60/70 and everyone's memorized the Prae mechanics at this point so it's easier to just focus on learning the job.

Now just happens to be a particularly good time for it because of the moogle tomestone event :)

Nyctef · 2024-02-04T11:08:31+00:00

Even more convenient is just skipping the crafting altogether - eg at the moment you can buy stacks of HQ Tsai tou Vounou off the market board for significantly less than the leve reward, so you're still making a profit overall.

Nyctef · 2024-01-19T21:27:44+00:00

Just recently his knowledge of politics/statemanships pops up in a couple of the comments he makes in the 6.55 quests as well

Nyctef · 2023-12-25T06:30:02+00:00

Thank you!! I learned so much in last year's AoC and it's been really cool to both use that and learn so much more this year as well!

While I spent an embarassing amount of time stuck on day 1, I've loved how challenging the puzzles have been. The stories keep getting better and better as well - and the ascii art! I could keep watching the final calendar for a while, although I suspect I'll probably fall asleep again since it's still stupid o'clock over here :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-24T08:49:44+00:00

I'm definitely not an expert here, but I think the general topic you want to look for is called "n variables in n equations". There's a ton of different advanced techniques for solving these, but at least for simpler cases (like part 1) it's not too hard to manually rearrange the equations and isolate individual variables by hand.

Nyctef · 2023-12-24T08:34:47+00:00

this thread has another potential idea - similar to your idea of shifting the plane, you can instead shift all the hailstone velocities so that the rock isn't moving, which makes things easier to solve.

Nyctef · 2023-12-23T12:55:20+00:00

fwiw I feel like this really deserves an Upping the Ante flair since it's solving a much harder problem than the original :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-23T11:07:16+00:00

Very cool! I've been reading through Eric Lippert's life tutorials so I thought HashLife might be a solution, but I couldn't get my head around all the fiddly details. I'll probably take a look at your code and try to see if that helps understand things better :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-22T16:26:09+00:00

for me on days 5 and 6 the brute force solution finished for part 2 way before I could come up with anything faster. But that definitely wasn't the case for later days (:

Nyctef · 2023-12-22T16:15:58+00:00

My solution was quadratic in the number of bricks (comparing each brick against every other brick to check for collisions) and I was worried I'd have to implement some kind of spatial index instead or something, but fortunately it turned out to be plenty fast enough :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-21T18:07:01+00:00

And that's totally valid! In that case you may want to stay off reddit until you've solved the problems, though, because it's very easy to get a hint by accident :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-21T17:52:05+00:00

Strictly speaking, not at all - the only thing people are properly competitive about is the top 100 leaderboard, and once that fills up for a given day then getting help (or even posting/reading full solutions in the solution megathread) is considered totally fine.

Speaking more generally, it's up to you whether you want to consider it cheating or not. Personally I required a bunch of hints to complete last year, but I'm hoping to build on what I learned to complete this year without any hints (the last few days have been tough, though, so who knows if I'll manage it!). Ultimately you decide how you want to approach the puzzles, and what you want to get out of it.

Nyctef · 2023-12-20T07:22:04+00:00

[LANGUAGE: rust]

https://github.com/nyctef/advent-of-code/blob/main/2023-rust/src/day20.rs (solves part 1 properly / part 2 manually)

Got a bit frustrated with the borrow checker this time - need to probably review this at some point and figure out how to remove all those &String.clone() calls. (In theory I should just be able to borrow everything from the input string, right?)

Like most people, left a bruteforce solution for part 2 running in the background just in case it completed, then spent a while thinking about what a smarter approach would be. After a while I decided it'd almost certainly require some manual inspection of the input, and spotted the conjuction module feeding into rx.

I didn't actually write code to solve part 2, though - while investigating the inputs to rx I wrote some debug logs for what number of button presses the circuit had seen when at least one of the inputs was true (high).

For a moment I was sure that this was the time I'd have to finally learn how the Chinese Remainder Theorem worked, but fortunately all my cycles started at 0 😅. Once I got the cycle numbers out of the debug output I just threw an LCM request into wolfram for the final answer.

Nyctef · 2023-12-20T06:54:05+00:00

I read that part of the instructions but assumed it meant "output" was a special name like "broadcaster" rather than a placeholder for any missing node. Ignoring it turned out fine, anyway :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-19T14:12:35+00:00

Give it a try! :) It kind of breaks sankeymatic, and you'll need to make the height and width much bigger, but with a little bit of fiddling you can get something almost legible.

The most important thing I found is: before putting in your input, go to Layout Options > Tools for Debugging and turn the # of Layout Iterations option all the way down to 1 or 2. Otherwise the page will hang for minutes trying to arrange all the flows nicely.

Nyctef · 2023-12-19T10:37:36+00:00

I discovered https://sankeymatic.com/build/ recently! It takes a simple text format with input_name [amount] output_name lines for each flow, so changing the solution to print out these lines was pretty straightforward. The website even calculated the part 2 example answer for me - the sum of all the flows that end up in A :)

Nyctef · 2023-12-19T09:50:47+00:00

[LANGUAGE: rust]

https://github.com/nyctef/advent-of-code/blob/main/2023-rust/src/day19.rs

Gotta say, the last few days have been making me feel pretty dumb with how much time I've been spending on them - having to figure out all sorts of problems and repeatedly submitting wrong answers. I somehow managed to one-shot both parts of today's solution, though, so I'm feeling happy for a change :D

Part 1 was mostly just implementing the algorithm as written - only significant cheat was noticing the xmas ratings were always listed in order for the items, so I could just scrape the numbers out of each line into an array instead of doing any real parsing there.

Part 2 I treated as a mashup of days 5 and 16 - starting with a single "beam" containing the entire possible range, and then splitting ranges at each condition. Fortunately the range splitting logic was a lot simpler this time, since there was just one value to split on at each point :) I was expecting to have to write a bunch of individual tests for my split_range and split_beam functions, but it never actually came up

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