While I'm sure there's a fast solution to day 16 part 2, I find fiddly numeric algorithms quite frustrating and my laptop at home is still running a brute-force solution 36 hours on. Day 17 part 1 was straightforward (mainly because it doesn't matter which way you follow a loop in the path so an effective strategy is to go straight ahead at every intersection) but part 2 seems to involve a depth-first search for the possible routes with another depth-first search to find a data compression candidate. Day 18 part 1 is another complex search.
I want to solve these problems and I want to do them well, not just find any old solution that gets me the stars. Hopefully that's evident in some of my earlier solutions which have tests and what I believe to be well-structured code, rather than a dense set of nested for loops iterating over a tuple-of-maps-of-lists-of data structure. The first two weeks of AoC 2019 were fun and mostly small enough to do in an hour or two, then optimise or improve if you have more time. The problems since day 16 are too hard to solve well in a single day. If you have other commitments (a job, kids, Christmas parties!) it's impossible. This, a bit of burn-out and Ben Lovy's post the other day have made me reconsider racing through AoC.
I hope to finish AoC 2019 but I feel I've already let the quality slip and that gives me no joy. I'll post solutions as I get them, even if that means I'm still thinking about how to help the elves when I'm sitting in the garden in the summer sun.
No need to apologize for doing what’s right for your health (mentally, spiritually, physically)! There are NO PRIZES or deadlines, so I encourage everyone to solve these at your leisure.
I’ll be watching these threads and the category tag, so I’m looking forward to see more people’s solutions.
My only hint: any solution that requires more than a minute or two to run is probably not the intended solution.
Also also: yesterday’s problem was most likely meant to be solved by hand for the middle portion. There was only 20-30 instruction pairs in my set...
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While I'm sure there's a fast solution to day 16 part 2, I find fiddly numeric algorithms quite frustrating and my laptop at home is still running a brute-force solution 36 hours on. Day 17 part 1 was straightforward (mainly because it doesn't matter which way you follow a loop in the path so an effective strategy is to go straight ahead at every intersection) but part 2 seems to involve a depth-first search for the possible routes with another depth-first search to find a data compression candidate. Day 18 part 1 is another complex search.
I want to solve these problems and I want to do them well, not just find any old solution that gets me the stars. Hopefully that's evident in some of my earlier solutions which have tests and what I believe to be well-structured code, rather than a dense set of nested for loops iterating over a tuple-of-maps-of-lists-of data structure. The first two weeks of AoC 2019 were fun and mostly small enough to do in an hour or two, then optimise or improve if you have more time. The problems since day 16 are too hard to solve well in a single day. If you have other commitments (a job, kids, Christmas parties!) it's impossible. This, a bit of burn-out and Ben Lovy's post the other day have made me reconsider racing through AoC.
I hope to finish AoC 2019 but I feel I've already let the quality slip and that gives me no joy. I'll post solutions as I get them, even if that means I'm still thinking about how to help the elves when I'm sitting in the garden in the summer sun.
No need to apologize for doing what’s right for your health (mentally, spiritually, physically)! There are NO PRIZES or deadlines, so I encourage everyone to solve these at your leisure.
I’ll be watching these threads and the category tag, so I’m looking forward to see more people’s solutions.
My only hint: any solution that requires more than a minute or two to run is probably not the intended solution.
Also also: yesterday’s problem was most likely meant to be solved by hand for the middle portion. There was only 20-30 instruction pairs in my set...