December is coming, and so is Advent of Code!

Yet another year of trying to keep up with the challenges for me, but I do like it. If you're also a Advent of Code enjoyer or want to give it a try, you can enter this leaderbord with the following code: 2283074-341a7152. It will be a leaderbord of all Warzone players.

Don't know anything about this? Check out this link xDhttps://adventofcode.com/2023/about

See you there!

Cool!

Bump, it's started.

whys this not in offtopic lol, looks like an ad to me?

it not in offtopic cause its on topic:
• we have a private leader board for WZ players
• you need programming to solve the puzzles

so it does fit in the WZ Programming forum ;)

Are you guys finding this year's advent of code tougher and a lot more work or is it just me? 😅

I swear I remember the first few days being super easy and short.

day 1 part 1 was easy, part 2 should be easy but i got a bug somewhere

havent tried the other days yet

dont really remember last year's problems tbh, but the solutions for this year's problems are more difficult afaik yeah

Oh yeah i agree, just looked at day 3 and man... How am I gonna do that in C? xD

You are doing this in C??? Why do you hate yourself?

I wanted to do it in Rust this year to relearn it, but I just went back to python. Too many useful and convenient functions :)

If there are things you are stuck on, feel free to mention here and maybe we can help out. I'm doing this with my company as well and we always share solutions after that we come up with to compare. My code is definitely too ugly to share right now though haha. Indexing is so annoying.

This season, the difficulty spike was too early.

I really hate the coding tasks, where the main issue of the task, is to code some cumbersome parsing of the input to a suitable data structure.

The spike definitely is going up very early on.

C is the language we are using for uni stuff all the time, dont have much experience with any other language as i have with C

But yeah, it is a pain sometimes but I do like some aspects of it

Looks like some parts of days are solvable using ChatGPT https://kyleholgate.com/advent-of-code-with-ai-day-1/.

I’m interested how much it’ll be able to solve.

From what I remember, AI was able to solve quite a few problems last year. Looks like they added a rule that you shouldn't be using it until the global leaderboard is decided for the day.

@JK the one tip I can think of is considering cases like "twone" if you are doing string replacement instead of just finding the index for each number word. You need to make sure you get both of the numbers instead of just "two".

My part 2 for day 4 doesn't match the example and i have no idea why https://github.com/DanWaLes/aoc/tree/main/2023/4.

I wasn't counting originals. Got it eventually.

Edited 12/4/2023 11:28:59

It's definitely been tougher relative to past AOCs early season.

Found this. Says to not share your inputs even in Git repos. Doesn’t mention it on the website.

https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/18an94z/psa_dont_share_your_inputs_even_in_your_github/

How long did day 5 part 2 take to execute for you?
I did 15,845,578,766 seeds one by one and took about 40 mins on AMD A8-7410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics 2.20 GHz and 8.00 GB (6.94 GB usable) RAM.

My python solution runs within 1 second on my notebook. It might have taken more than 40 minutes to code though.

One can notice, that all the maps have linear dependencies, and that it is possible to collapse all the maps to a single map.
So I made an algorithm, that splits the initial range of seed into subranges, with each seed within has the same seed-to-location offset.
After that, for each resulting subrange, you only check the starting seed of that subrange + the offset, and select the minimum among them.

I really like the tasks of day 4 and 5, because they are easy to implement the first part, but require some tricky optimizations to solve them in full. That's how the AoC tasks should be.

Edited 12/5/2023 16:58:18