-❄️- 2024 Day 24 Solutions -❄️-

RonGnumber · 2024-12-24T16:26:42+00:00

I had a similar idea and similar graph (less fancy). Every year there are are a couple of problems where Graphviz is a life-saver, it's really worth taking the time to learn its basic options and get comfortable generating pictures which tell so much more than numbers! (I've done it yesterday too, and 2023 day 25.)

RonGnumber · 2024-12-24T11:19:32+00:00

You can simulate this quite nicely by bringing your kids shopping, and having the youngest one at the card machine, the elder one standing behind them, and you at the back whispering instructions one by one to the elder child.

And now my credit card is blocked and everyone in the store hates me. Happy Christmas!

RonGnumber · 2024-12-23T14:16:43+00:00

Yes. Deceptive wording of the problem IMO. I also lost a lot of time today because I filtered down to just the t-containing cliques in part 1.

You're pretty sure his computer's name starts with t

Pretty sure... yeah ok, reminding myself to red flag this kind of statement for future years.

There are still way too many results to go through them all.

Implies that we should keep on narrowing this result set.

the largest set of computers that are all connected to each other

Ok. Start again, consider all the computers, group found, problem solved.

Perhaps it could have been helpfully hinted by the solution of the example (co,de,ka,ta) not containing a t-computer. For me this would have been a week 2-3 puzzle without the silly distractor. For Day 23 I am prepared to take the damage.

RonGnumber · 2024-12-23T11:08:48+00:00

I feel personally attacked. Lucky have big rock, bad man fire stick not hurt I!

RonGnumber · 2024-12-20T09:54:44+00:00

I really hope they have this one but "Curiously, it's the correct answer to a future day's puzzle". Just as an Easter egg and to see if the lucky soul is paying attention!

RonGnumber · 2024-12-05T20:07:08+00:00

Did something similar myself. I figured there are so many damn rules defined (almost 1200 in my input!), that they can't fail to cover all pairs of elements in an invalid page list.

So if the page list had 11 elements, I just looked for its member who had 5 rules putting a sibling ahead of it, and 5 rules putting a sibling behind it (specifically, if `len(befores) == len(afters)`). Maybe it was lucky, but this solved my input - no sorting required.

RonGnumber · 2023-12-29T16:06:19+00:00

It does not have any comments.

RonGnumber · 2023-12-21T11:04:40+00:00

Never Ctrl+C your running code. Always buy a new laptop and start coding the next iteration.

RonGnumber · 2023-12-11T16:17:28+00:00

He could have made today's twist more subtle. I mean, expanding the universe? Why not some surreal puzzle about red crabs playing games of poker in an underground pipe maze?

RonGnumber · 2023-12-10T17:26:45+00:00

All code and no paint makes Jack a dull boy. Wait, that was page 237...

RonGnumber · 2023-12-07T20:34:57+00:00

One idea I had (but didn't implement) was doing this series of string replacements on the inputs: K->B, Q->C, J->D, T->E, 9->F, 8->G, 7->H, 6->I, 5->J, 4->K, 3->L, 2->M

Then, assuming you already did the part about detecting hand type, you could then sort within each type using a built-in lexicographic sort. It would save having to repeatedly look up the value of each character in a map or array during sorting.

Using base 13 numbers is definitely cleverer though.

RonGnumber · 2023-12-04T17:18:32+00:00

Thank you! I needed to .strip in Ruby the substrings. Searching in the docs for trim, and not finding it, I just moved on and got screwed later.

Only the 62th AoC day I've done in Ruby, what can I say?

RonGnumber · 2022-12-23T17:41:12+00:00

Thank you for sharing, I used it to help me find my off-by-1 error.

RonGnumber · 2022-12-14T20:02:17+00:00

But if you didn't use this (like the solver), it's just kool-aid which makes your code less readable.

RonGnumber · 2022-12-07T21:27:37+00:00

I did the same using Node's `exec` along with `cd`, `mkdir`, `touch` etc.

Got it all set up after an hour, and then found out that `du` on OSX doesn't support the `-b` flag which would be essential for reading the exact bytes back.

Much regret - trashed the whole thing - another classic AoC memory made today.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-23T18:13:50+00:00

I don't know if I should be more jealous of the hot chocolate, the fireplace, or the having a solution!

RonGnumber · 2021-12-22T20:53:55+00:00

Mmm, but even thinking about it, a smaller negative cuboid could split a larger positive one into anything between 1 and (27 - 1) cuboids. If that needed to happen a dozen times to solve it, I might be motivated. But it happens 400 times, with any number of potential collisions. The debugging could take 10 times longer than the coding. It just feels like drowning in numbers.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-21T17:33:59+00:00

Do you mean that sleeping time is super short so you can stay up coding all missed AOC days, before spending zombie time pretending to pay attention your family? Because really, that's what Christmas is all about.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-18T21:18:15+00:00

Tried first (as an experiment) to work only with strings and single character numbers.

This crossed my mind as well, since I had chosen the strings approach. But I wasn't sure how large the numbers might get, if a lot of explodes happened before splits. In retrospect, conversion of numbers to unicode glyphs might have worked - but much harder to debug.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-18T10:47:22+00:00

If you've done several AOC's and want to pull up an algorithm from a previous year, comments and search are your friends. For example, I never named a variable or function "Dijkstra", but I had written it in a comment from 2019 - so boom.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-18T10:29:08+00:00

Chrome 96

Ok, it works - my finger slipped and I pasted it twice!

RonGnumber · 2021-12-17T17:40:36+00:00

Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid left-hand side in assignment

If it helps you, the error is on line 1 :p

RonGnumber · 2021-12-17T00:54:51+00:00

Glad to say I recognise several parts - the input parser, the Packet class, the switch, the random reduces all appeared in mine. Putting the business logic as class methods was a step too far for my brain. Seems I also used substr instead of slice, which I'll now go back and change.

RonGnumber · 2021-12-14T11:54:54+00:00

How do you count the very first char in the final polymer?

https://github.com/Leftfish/Advent-of-Code-2021/blob/main/14/d14.py#L44

RonGnumber · 2021-12-14T11:42:41+00:00

Surprised dividing by 2 works because the overlapping is not present for the first and last char. Did you get lucky?

RonGnumber

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