Advent of Code

It’s happening already. The slow crushing creep of laziness. I have not done part 2, yet, and I will, maybe get to it. I have ideas for how to solve part 2, its just… Kind of tedious and I want a respite. Part 1 was fun though. Basically just, a simple pathfinding robot to trace the path of a guard through a maze of obstacles. I even gave it the ability to draw the map, …

Well, it’s an easy and hard-ish day. I kind of hate the part 2s on these because they are almost always annoying. It was a bit more interesting on the input because it was a two part input. I’m still getting weird empty spaces at the end too, which I have just been trimming with a .pop(), but that’s a bit sloppy. Today’s puzzle is verifying sorting of sets of numbers. Part 1 was pretty …

Weee, the first real “pain in the ass” day and it’s only day 4! Ok, it wasn’t awful, I had the right idea, for the most part. I wanted to do something better for Part 2, but it wasn’t working out, but I’ll get there. For this puzzle, you get a blog of text with the letters of XMAS in them, randomly, scattered. Sometimes it actually spells XMAS, it’s a “crossword” puzzle. The ides is …

This was so much easier than yesterday, since I wasn’t splitting my focus between trying to be clever and trying to write shitty code. Day 03’s problem involved digging through a block of “corrupted code” to pull out important and usable data. I ended up forcing myself to use the logical method here, and built a Regex string. Despite that I write a lot of simple scripts to process and convert data for automation, I …

This entire Post is one big code block, because I did a stupid thing that felt like a good idea at the time. #Lets comment the heck out of this one and flow with the process. So it may look a little ugly. # I am essentially just… blogging in real time, in the comments now…. #Until the end, I am using the sample data set # 7 6 4 2 1 # 1 2 …

Apparently I only attempt do Advent of Code every other year. I had this vague thought about doing this thing in JavaScript this year, but considering I am way better at Python than JS, and I have yet to actually complete one of these 100%, i should stick with what am good-ish at. The early day are always stupid easy. It’s usually around halfway they have some super goofy and hard problem that I get …

Well, I made it farther than my last “in real time attempt” in 2020 by 3 starts. I may check in one the puzzles each day, but my experience is, they only get more complex as time goes on, so I doubt I’ll be completing any more of them. Each day is starting to take a lot more time to solve out, the solutions are getting a lot more finicky to produce. We’ve also reached …

Man, I really enjoyed today’s puzzle. Like, a lot. I think because it kind of felt like a game level, and probably also because it’s fluid dynamics and I am totally into Physics and Engineering shit. For the “Plot” you enter into a cave and discover a cavern with sand falling from the ceiling. The sand accumulates in a pile and “flows” around based on some simple left then right rules. This problem consisted of …

Have I ever mentioned before how much I hate Recursion? So, I feel like I mentioned on a previous Advent of Code post, half the problem of these puzzles is figuring out how to massage the input. Which I started to work with until I found the eval() function, which I don’t recall using before. But it basically will take something like a string that looks like a list, say, “[2,[4,5,6]]” and make it into …

So, day 12, you get an elevation map, and you get to run a path-finding algorithm on it to find the shortest path up the hill. That sounds kind of complicated. So I did it with the best computer I have available, my mind. And Microsoft Word, and some color coded path markers. I did do a bit of black outs on obvious dead ends so my final map looks like some sort of government …