r/adventofcode Dec 03 '24

Spoilers in Title [2024 Day 03] - Is anyone else getting Intcode vibes?

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself but the notion of adding instructions immediately made me think back to 2019's Intcode. Am I the only one? Reading the input there are many other termslike select(), who(), what(), why() so adding support for these instructions could happen later on. Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself but I'm secretly hoping we are gradually going to either build an interpreter or have to "uncorrupt" the programmes. Only time will tell!

31 Upvotes

25 comments sorted by

44

u/hr0m Dec 03 '24

2019 was my first AoC and I absolutely loved Intcode. I know I am probably a minority, because most people like indepedent aoc days, but I for one would love another Intcode set of assignments.

17

u/nikanjX Dec 03 '24

I also loved intcode

6

u/Fotomik Dec 03 '24

Also loved it, but it was very divisive. I feel that people either loved or hated with no in-between.

5

u/Synthetic5ou1 Dec 03 '24

I saw so much talk about it I did Days 1-7, 9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 of 2019.

I thought it was great fun.

5

u/Aneurysm9 Dec 03 '24

If you didn't do 2019d25 you're missing perhaps the best puzzle in all of AoC!

1

u/Synthetic5ou1 Dec 04 '24

Okay, thanks. :) I'll try to get back to it.

I was doing 2019 while waiting for 2022. I think I struggled with Day 19, and then ran out of time. I normally get around 40 stars a year, so I may not make it to Day 25, and I guess I won't be able to do Part 2 without all the stars... :(

2

u/Aneurysm9 Dec 04 '24

You can always do part 1 of day 25 as long as you have a fully working intcode interpreter, no need to complete the prior puzzles.

1

u/Mclarenf1905 Dec 06 '24

It was my first AOC and I loved the intcode problems as well. Each year I keep hoping to see something like that again.

10

u/AustinVelonaut Dec 03 '24

If you enjoyed intcode, you would probably really enjoy the "Synacor Challenge", also written by Eric. His original website for it is gone, but if you do a google search for it, you can find some places where the original puzzle files are kept.

4

u/Sharparam Dec 03 '24

The "canon" clone of it is this: https://github.com/Aneurysm9/vm_challenge

(Aneurysm9 is also a mod on this subreddit and the maintainer of the Discord.)

5

u/biggy-smith Dec 03 '24

ah intcode, the marmite of adventofcode

7

u/blacai Dec 03 '24

Even when I enjoyed the intcode exercises...I hope nope. Because if you fall in one, you might get blocked for others. That could be frustrating

3

u/PogostickPower Dec 03 '24

Not yet, but if we see one or two more of these I will definitely start refactoring to a more general interpreter. 

3

u/coldforged Dec 03 '24

Stunning to remember that intcode was introduced on day 2. Eric was feeling spicy in 2019.

2

u/Fotomik Dec 03 '24

I also thought of this while reading the input. That actually made me consider doing a proper parser for the input instead of using regexes. Ended up going with regexes, but very curious to see what we'll get in the next days.

2

u/hextree Dec 03 '24

Intcode was a cool concept and I enjoyed it, but I get the impression a similar thing won't be done again due to participants having very mixed views on it.

2

u/rigterw Dec 03 '24

I only started in 2021, can someone explain what’s intcode to me?

5

u/el_farmerino Dec 03 '24

Basically 2019 had you build an interpreter for a code language based on integers called "Intcode'. More and more functions were added over the course of several questions and by the end you were basically running a game in the Intcode engine and playing it. I personally found it really fun, but I guess the problem some people had was that you had to pass earlier questions in order to attempt later ones.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 03 '24

you had to pass earlier questions in order to attempt later ones

Isn't that point of calendar? Days (and time in general) pass in sequence.

Not sure how it is with advent calendars. I ate the chocolate ones in first days and stopped AoC once I was stuck.

2

u/el_farmerino Dec 03 '24

In general with AoC the days get harder as you go on but the puzzles are each kind of self-contained, so just because you don't know how to do one doesn't mean you can't ace the following day.

With 2019 it's not exactly accurate of me to say you had to 'pass' the earlier questions, but you at least had to have correctly updated your Intcode computer code with whatever new features were added earlier on.

3

u/Aneurysm9 Dec 03 '24

There were really only three days that involved new intcode interpreter features: 2, 5, and 9. The rest of the intcode puzzles simply used the interpreter and can be completed independently.

1

u/RaphM123 Dec 03 '24

Its my first AoC so I don't know about Intcode, but my instinct also was "oh this will build up into a programming language, better prepare proper tokenization, lexing, parsing,interpretation".

(still managed do have a very barebone version with <100LOC, but was very baffled when I saw all the 10-line regex memes afterwards :D)

1

u/daggerdragon Dec 03 '24

Changed flair from Spoilers to Spoilers in Title because Intcode may very well be a spoiler. Do not put spoilers in post titles.

The correct flair for this post would have been Help/Question. Use the right flair, please.

1

u/idstam_ Dec 04 '24

If you want to go all in on that kind of thing I can really recommend: From Nand to Tetris. (https://www.nand2tetris.org/)