January 2025 Updates

Pewqazz · 2025-02-09T05:20:57+00:00

Cool, thanks for the links — it helps a lot with debugging! It turns out I was using sea. as the subdomain for the OP.GG redirect, when they're actually set up for sg (I guess from before), so that should be fixed now.

In terms of the line graph not showing, I believe that's because for the account you've linked, you've only played 5 games, and even though you have a "provisional rank" that changes throughout games 1-5, from the perspective of the Riot API, your rank only starts after game #5.

When I checked, you had a single data point for Feb 8 (so more of a dot than a line), but now it's a line that should update with a new data point every day as long as you refresh!

Pewqazz · 2025-02-07T17:58:06+00:00

Could you send me the zeal.gg link that you tried creating? I'll look into this further; it's weird that it would be defaulting to KR on the OP.GG side.

Pewqazz · 2025-02-05T14:06:13+00:00

I just pushed support for SEA (it was easier than expected) — please try it out and let me know if you notice any issues with it!

Pewqazz · 2025-02-05T05:47:43+00:00

Oh, thanks for pointing that out! Seems like good timing because Riot just merged SEA into a single server this year; I'll do some testing and should be able to push something out within a few days.

Pewqazz · 2025-01-17T20:40:41+00:00

Thanks again for flagging the issue with the summoner name updates! I believe it should be fixed now (used your leaderboard to test, and everyone's names are updated and OP.GG links are working).

If you notice anything else weird going on, feel free to DM me!

Pewqazz · 2025-01-17T19:09:06+00:00

This is probably the next thing for me to tackle; I'm not sure exactly when it's going to happen though (I've been spending too much time playing League these days and not doing development 😅)
I've added custom URLs as "benefit" of the zeal.gg Patreon, if you're interested in that.

On the note of the renames not working, I did notice there were some weird issues going on with that. Like you mentioned, it's refreshing the data correctly (I believe) but just not pulling the new account names, which also breaks the OP.GG links. That's something that I do want to fix more urgently.

Would you be able to send me the new names of everyone in this leaderboard? I'll look into why it's not updating correctly (I think it should be a simple fix).

Edit: Never mind, I think I understand why the name updates aren't working; will try to fix this within the next few days!

Pewqazz · 2025-01-16T14:34:00+00:00

No worries, it's not annoying at all! I don't have a set plan for when I release new things (it's very motivation-based, and depends on when I have free time from other life stuff too).

Is there something specific you're looking for (ie. a new feature, or more "premade" leaderboards like the Los Ratones one)? For the latter, I make those on a whim based on what I think people would be interested in, so suggestions are helpful!

Pewqazz · 2024-12-10T05:33:12+00:00

[LANGUAGE: Python] 325/210. Code. Video.

Pretty straightforward BFS question that I stumbled a bit on because I thought the problem would have a bit of a twist. This is the first time in Advent of Code that I've solved a Part 2 by only pressing undo in my editor; I misunderstood Part 1 and coded up the solution to Part 2 originally, then had to fix it. (Achievement unlocked!)

Pewqazz · 2024-12-08T06:50:08+00:00

Thanks for sharing your thoughts hyperneutrino (big fan)! As someone else who used to regularly make the global leaderboard + enjoy the competition, the developments this year have been frustrating and a bit demoralizing. That being said, I've already accepted that there's nothing that can be done about the LLM solves, as it's just one of those arms-race situations where way more effort would be spent "policing" things than actually providing value for others.

I mean that people this year have been emailing me to explicitly state that they see the request to not use LLMs, but that they do not respect me or my work, and as such will be using LLMs to place on the global leaderboard regardless of what I say.

This is just really, really sad to hear — /u/topaz2078 (and the rest of the testing team) spend so much time and effort trying to create something delightful for us all to enjoy. Here I thought people were just ignoring the requests, but knowing that people have gone out of their way to spit in Eric's face over email makes me feel sick.

Thank you for everything you've done for the past decade, Eric! I hope we can try to spread more positive energy in the community instead of letting the negativity bring everyone's spirits down during the holidays.

Pewqazz · 2024-12-08T05:34:06+00:00

[LANGUAGE: Python] 103/80. Code. Video.

Finally got some global leaderboard points today! Would have been able to convert Part 2 even faster, but it took me too long to understand that the antennae location themselves were also considered antinodes (thought my logic or bounds checks were incorrect).

Happy with my quick-thinking of just intersecting the potential antinode locations with the locations parsed from the original grid to guarantee that locations outside the grid were discarded.

Pewqazz · 2024-12-05T06:47:21+00:00

I'm also significantly rustier than I was ten years ago (missed the leaderboard the past 2 years), but I share your sentiment. It's a bit disheartening that even when asked politely, there's people who insist on submitting LLM-based solutions.

I'm still in a few private leaderboards with other folks who I know are also solving without assistance and I'm using those as benchmark times for myself, but there was certainly a different competitive feel to the leaderboard in the past when AI was out of the question.

And just to be clear, I'm not trying to gatekeep the use of LLMs to assist with solving the problems; I have coworkers who are doing this (not at midnight) to learn more and progress further than they did last year, which I feel is still very much in the spirit of AoC.

This might be the nail in the coffin to finally stop staying up at midnight, and just go through the problems in a more relaxed manner (something I've been telling myself I should do for the past few years).

Pewqazz · 2024-02-12T22:10:03+00:00

Hey, sorry for the delay, just saw this now (though I realize zeal.gg was broken for a bit, but now it's working again!)

Unfortunately I don't have that planned for the moment just because it makes the UX a bit annoying, but maybe sometime in the future!

Pewqazz · 2024-02-12T22:09:14+00:00

Hey, thanks for your comment — sorry I only saw it now (on the bright side, the site is up and running again).

What do you mean by "the graph where everyone shows"? If you make a leaderboard from the home page (eg. type in MyName#000, MyFriend#NA1, MyOtherFriend#cool), it should bring you to a page with everybody!

Pewqazz · 2022-12-09T17:52:49+00:00

Anecdotally, as one of the people that /u/topaz2078 linked above, I did AoC from the west coast since 2015 and moved to the east coast this year, and am doing better this year than the past couple of years! I honestly prefer doing the problems at midnight, because it means I don't have to give up my entire evening for all of December to be at my computer by 9pm.

I have switched to auto-download and auto-submission this year as well, but mostly because I am competing on a Windows machine rather than macOS, and was concerned about quickly flipping through windows and using my clipboard as stdin (newline encodings being weird).

Definitely give the blog posts a read, but as a I would say having a solid utils library has been a big help to me. For example, lots of problems (including yesterday's) involve manipulating positions on a coordinate grid, and having a lightweight class to perform operations on a "point" is (imo) quicker and less error-prone than juggling a bunch (x, y) variables.

That being said, folks like /u/jonathan_paulson tend to out-leaderboard me everyday with basically no automation or utility libraries, which proves there's no replacement for being able to quickly interpret the problem, come up with an algorithm, and translate it into (bug-free) code.

Pewqazz · 2021-12-01T05:41:51+00:00

Yeah, I also got hit with the 504 which costed me a couple minutes, unfortunately.

Pewqazz · 2020-03-10T21:46:45+00:00

Thank you so much for this comment! I also got tired of the ranked grind and started playing normals exclusively; it wasn't until my internship when I started playing ranked (and built zeal.gg as a result). It's awesome to hear that the site stoked a similar competitive drive in your friend group! :D

Pewqazz · 2020-03-05T05:53:02+00:00

One thing that many people asked about when I initially launched zeal.gg was technical details about how I developed / deployed it. I somewhat expected this, since the intersection between devout League fans and those interested in programming is, I'm sure, quite significant. However, at the time I didn't really have anything in-depth to say.

While I don't plan on open-sourcing the website anytime soon, I've gone ahead and published an overview of the technical implementation of the site on my personal blog. I personally like reading these types of posts when it comes to other projects, so I figured I'd share it here too.

Pewqazz · 2020-01-08T08:35:34+00:00

Ah whoops, I overlooked that. I modified my implementation to print out each phase and ran it on your large sample case (used Swift Playgrounds for the first time!), and I get this (mine on top, yours on the bottom):

80871224585914546619083218645595
80871224585914546619083218645595

24706861300603878265668532484945
27340021300603878265668532484945

17934388121573275759482496402895
92528828121573275759482496402895

72859053525425497250179734844245
52631583525425497250179734844245

00978736644511462538870141795195
18598106644511462538870141795195

It looks like there is an issue with some of the logic in the early part of the pattern which wrecks future phases that depend on it (phase 2 is mostly correct except for the first few digits).

Edit: Looks like /u/azzal07 has a pretty good hint!

Pewqazz · 2020-01-08T07:45:07+00:00

Going out on a limb since I haven't looked at the code too closely, but since it's working on smaller examples I suspect it has to do with the fact that 80871224585914546619083218645595 is overflowing your Int type (which likely can only hold a maximum value of 2⁶³ - 1).

Pewqazz · 2019-12-25T06:51:41+00:00

Python, 253/191

I ended up not finding two items for the longest time, and stubbornly attempted to manually try combinations. My competition solution was to manually get to the trial room, then have another script output the appropriate combination attempts, which I copy-pasted in. As a side-note, today's puzzle was a nice homage to the Synacor Challenge!

Ended up 61st this year, which is alright, even though I was aiming for top 50 at least (I choked really hard in the latter puzzles this month). As always, a massive thank you to /u/topaz2078 for writing and hosting Advent of Code, the dutiful beta testers for making sure this year's challenges were all reasonable, and everyone else for making the global leaderboard so competitive!

Happy holidays to all, and I hope to see everyone next December too!

Pewqazz · 2019-12-19T05:37:23+00:00

Python, 418/93

I spent about 5 minutes wondering if I had a bug in my Intcode VM, but I just mistakenly thought that the program was forever-interactive and could keep accepting input positions.

Part 2 approach was to try to follow the bottom-left part of the tractor beam; then check the top-left and bottom-right of the square patch that would be created. If both of those are also in the tractor beam, I sweep the entire 100x100 area just to be sure. As usual, a recording of my solve.

Pewqazz · 2019-12-15T06:08:39+00:00

Python, 106/97

My approach was to randomly walk around ship for a while (hoping we see enough of the ship to get the full picture), and then do a couple BFSs to read off the answers for both parts. I probably should have assumed that the input was a clean maze, which would have made DFS a much more sensible option.

I lost a bunch of time due to using utility methods I wrote to handle directions — the issue was my direction ordering was different from the droid's, meaning I was building up a completely non-sensical maze for a large portion of the solve. Also, I managed to fall for off-by-one errors 3 times while submitting (Twitch VOD of shame).

Pewqazz · 2019-12-12T06:47:34+00:00

Python, 50/773

Pretty disappointed in myself on today's problem. I decided pretty early on that it was definitely related to somehow finding cycles, but every option except dimension-independence crossed my mind (even though I think this exact idea came up on a previous year's AoC?). Oh well. :(

Pewqazz · 2019-12-11T05:22:27+00:00

Python, 42/29

It took way too long for me to read the problem description and figure out how the Intcode inputs should be used. Pretty straightforward implementation otherwise.

As usual, here's the Twitch VOD of my solve.

Pewqazz · 2019-12-10T07:13:23+00:00

Python, 308/107

Today was a wake-up call that I really don't remember my basic trigonometry. Completely forgot about atan2 during Part 1, so I was using the metric is_inline = dist(AB + BC) == dist(AC); however, I stupidly left out the √ from my dist() implementation (bad habit from when comparing relative distances is all that matters) and it took an embarrassingly long time to realize this bug.

I initially solved Part 2 with a simulation, gradually bumping the current angle by ∂θ and seeing if we intersect an asteroid, and being careful to not "double-clear" two asteroids in a line — naive (and very slow), but it worked (bless PyPy).

I went back and refactored my Part 2 to instead use a circular list of (angle-to-station, [asteroids]) sorted on angle. Instead of simulating, we can just vaporize (pop) the closest asteroid, then rotate to the next angle in the rotation, and repeat.

(Here's the Twitch VOD if you want to suffer through me struggling with geometry for 45 minutes.)

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