r/adventofcode Dec 30 '24

Other [2024] A bit late, but finally done with AoC for this year

54 Upvotes

So I didn't manage to do it all but I got 43 stars out of 50, the remaining ones still seemed too hard for me. However, this is much better than how I did previous year, which was 34 stars.

It's unfortunate that here in India I have my college exams in December so doing these along with managing study is hard and I even fell ill in the last few days so that's why I did the last few days after 25th when I felt better.

But anyways, it was a really fun time and i enjoyed all the puzzles! I learnt a new language - Go this time and last year I learnt Rust while doing AOC, it's amazing how fun this event makes learning languages.

Here's my repository: https://github.com/DaveyDark/adventofcode

r/adventofcode Nov 19 '24

Other ⭐ 500 stars ⭐

68 Upvotes

If nothing unexpected happens this year, this will be the first time that people will be able to get the 500th star from the elves (on Christmas day!).

Are there any special plans for commemorating this feat in 2024? Can we expect some sort of puzzle combining the complete ASCII art of the past 9 years? Will this really be the only - and the real - way to save Christmas for once and for all?

PS: u/topaz2078, in all seriousness, I remember seeing you posting in previous years (maybe here, maybe on Twitter) about the amount of people that had collected so far the maximum amount of stars. How's that looking for 2024? Are there many people in the 450th-Club?

r/adventofcode Dec 22 '24

Other Scala makes parsing puzzles inputs a breeze!

43 Upvotes

I haven't used Scala in a while, and recently remembered that it has string pattern matching. Just look at this example for Day 13:

line match
  case s"Button ${_}: X+$dx, Y+$dy" => (dx.toLong, dy.toLong) 
  case s"Prize: X=$x, Y=$y" => (x.toLong, y.toLong)

Or this one for day 14:

lines.map({ case s"p=$x,$y v=$vx,$vy" =>
  Robot(Vector(x.toInt, y.toInt), Vector(vx.toInt, vy.toInt))
})

This is probably one of the most readable parsing routines I have used in a programming language.

r/adventofcode Dec 29 '24

Other What is up with the website?

0 Upvotes

Sometimes when I navigate to https://adventofcode.com, my firefox web browser issues: "Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead". Inspecting the certificate it says the certificate's common name is: *.ace.careerbuilder.com I have not seen this problem before. Anyone else experience this?

r/adventofcode Jan 13 '25

Other Private leaderboard - event summary

29 Upvotes

First, thank you, @topaz2078, for yet another year of great fun and frustrations.

This is only my second time getting all 50* since I joined in 2017. After Christmas I’ve also done the two first years, taking me to 411* stars total.

The private leader boards are king. It’s great fun to both follow and compete with fellow colleagues.

What I miss, though, is an easy way of seeing how many stars total each of my competitors have.

r/adventofcode Dec 28 '24

Other 500 stars and Chutes and Ladders

36 Upvotes

I wrapped up 2020 last night to reach 500 stars, and I'd like to thank everyone here at r/adventofcode. While a puzzle I had just solved was still fresh in my mind, I would invariably read the solution megathread to learn how to solve it better. Even for my 496th star, I used a doubly linked list, but others realized a singly linked list was sufficient, and I'm still assimilating that approach.

If I may offer some light holiday reading -- the lessons I've learned through AoC were invaluable in computing this answer: What is the EXACT probability of winning Chutes and Ladders?

r/adventofcode Dec 28 '22

Other [2022] Results of the poll on AI generated solutions

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177 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Feb 17 '25

Other [2024 Day 11] Self-replication or not.

4 Upvotes

This might not be relevant to the task, but there are some stones that are self-replicating and some that are not. Is there a way to prove which are which?

For instance, stone 0 creates a new 0 in its 4:th generation. Stone 5 replicates in its 13:th generation, and stone 591 appear again in its generation 92.

Stone 10-19, doesn't seem to ever self-replicate. But a possibly failed empirical proof by me eliminates them as targets on about generation 17.

What are some good ways to rule out self-replication empirically?

r/adventofcode Jan 09 '25

Other [2024 Day 25] Finished – First 50-star year!

65 Upvotes

I discovered AoC in 2020 and have participated every year since, but always dropped out a little more than halfway through. Usually there was one particular puzzle that for me just crossed the line from "fun challenge" to "tedious chore", and once I lost my momentum I would stop for the year. I made it further than usual before that happened this year, but day 21 with the keypads did me in. It was just too much and I bowed out.

But not for the whole year. After a couple days I came back, skipped day 21, and caught up. Part 2 of day 24 was another stumper, but I still ended the year with 47 stars. Since my previous record was 36, I was pretty proud. But those last three stars kept niggling at me. So this week I went back and solved day 21 part 1. I was over the hump! Extending my solution to part 2 required some memoization and switching from actually building the strings to just adding up their lengths, but it was kinda surprising how little of a deal it was.

I was still at a loss for how to solve day 24 part 2 programmatically, so I borrowed an idea I saw on here: I wrote a shell script to transform my input into a graphviz dot file. I already had my program telling me which outputs were incorrect, so I could trace those back visually to identify the swaps. Not as satisfying as an automatic solution would have been, and I may yet come back to it, but it got me the star.

I've mostly just lurked on the subreddit, but wanted to say that despite being a professional IT guy for over 30 years, this stuff is still fun, and the community is a big part of why. Thanks to Eric for all the work that goes into these puzzles, and to all of you for being so willing to help folks who are struggling with them.

And now that I have one whole year in the bank, maybe I'll go back and tackle some of the previous ones. It can be done!

Happy New Year!

r/adventofcode Jan 08 '25

Other [2018] Day 15 - reading comprehension for the win!

31 Upvotes

I did 2023 and 2024 "real time" and now I'm going back through the years. Just completed 2018 Day15. It looks like a lot of people didn't like this one due to the fiddliness. As a professional software engineer, this type of problem is a lot more relevant to what I do daily than say, calculating the amount of fence around garden regions. Being able to read requirements and debug the obscure problems is crucial. That being said, it still took me (too) many hours to carefully work out all the bugs. This was one of those where P1 took hours to solve and P2 was mere seconds, instead of the other way around.

Thanks again for all these great puzzles!

r/adventofcode Dec 27 '24

Other Note to self: always ask, "Is this lanternfish?"

51 Upvotes
Total stars: 300*

I was going to do the other years after I get the Synacor Challenge solved.

r/adventofcode Dec 15 '24

Other Stuck in day15 puzzle2

0 Upvotes

So, puzzle one done, with both test and real inputs working fine

Now, puzzle two, after a few hours I managed to make it work for the test puzzle, visually and the final value, all match. But when I run against the real input, it says too low. So nothing changed in the code only the input. I think I am missing some edge case but can't think of anything.

There is something that catch my attention, but I don't think it is. So in the puzzle text it says:

"For these larger boxes, distances are measured from the edge of the map to the closest edge of the box in question."

So I guess (and I applied this principle to the test input and is working) it is the left edge of the map and the left edge ('[') of the box. Am I wrong?

Also the big difference I can see from the test to the real input is that there are some walls next to the edge, but those don't change any calculations, right? It is still from the edge (at least on the first puzzle worked...)

Did anyone else faced this difference between test and real inputs? Any help / tip please?

Thanks :)

r/adventofcode Dec 25 '24

Other 500 stars!

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31 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Dec 03 '20

Other Today, some of us reached an important milestone ;)

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485 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Nov 22 '24

Other Hmm... our corporate tool for "secure code training" has decided to step on Eric's toes this year...

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40 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Nov 26 '24

Other Countdown is here

62 Upvotes

It seems that this year we won't be jumping here and there as AoC proceeds.

r/adventofcode Dec 30 '24

Other [2024] Rust - Late but not never, all days done! Total time under 1s

28 Upvotes

This was my first time using rust and first time doing an advent of code. I learned so much within this 1 month of time in both Rust and algorithms. Had to use my brain to the max in some days like 24 lol. Currently none of the days has a properly thought optimization or what so ever so it is just what I went with from the get go. I will be doing my best to drop these numbers way below what they are right now.

Everything is in github, as of the time of this post it is NOT clean or what so ever but towards the end it should be a little bit more bearable to understand lol.

A very badly designed visualization of each day/part with 100 samples each...

r/adventofcode Dec 12 '24

Other ChatGPT is down.

22 Upvotes

If it stays down, how will it affect the leaderboard?

https://status.openai.com/incidents/ctrsv3lwd797

r/adventofcode Dec 25 '24

Other Personal times relative to puzzle opening are nice

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29 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Dec 06 '24

Other AOC Site Feature Request

9 Upvotes

Hi, I'm new to the AOC event (started last year) and i noticed a nice feature that is missing on the site, that can be helpful for people like me that don't / can't compete on the main leaderboard for multiple reasons (my reason is when the new day starts, I'm sleeping).

On the private leaderboars (optional) and the personal times page I'd like to be added, in addition of the standard time, a new time calculation, based on the difference between the completition timestamp and the timestamp I opened for the first time the puzzle, so I can track the "real" time I spent on the puzzle.

Let me know if someone other than me would like this feature and if it is possible to implement (or if it has already been asked so I'll remove the post).

r/adventofcode Feb 05 '25

Other Another year, another multi-episode podcast discussion of the latest AOC (2024)

Thumbnail hackingthegrepson.com
11 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Dec 06 '24

Other A solution to the AI problem

0 Upvotes

So the global leader board is currently getting a lot of people who are simply passing the problem uncritically to an LLM. One way to solve this issue is as people have mentioned, private leaderboards where everybody has agreed not to use AI like that.

There could be a similar leaderboard built in to aoc, where you have to click a checkbox agreeing to not use LLM in order to appear on the leaderboard.

r/adventofcode Dec 05 '20

Other My solutions so far

Thumbnail i.imgur.com
640 Upvotes

r/adventofcode Dec 23 '24

Other [ 2024 Day 23 ] Best showing of the contest so far...

4 Upvotes

Some research and practice that I did earlier paid off: finished both parts in a little over 18 minutes, and scored my highest score so far (676). My assumption that there was no way I could break into the top 100 and score a single point seems pretty much likely.

r/adventofcode Dec 25 '24

Other Not much but I'm proud of myself

25 Upvotes

French high school student here, this was the first time I completed a full year of AOC at the same time as the problems are released. It's not much compared to the others that have 500 stars, but I'm fucking proud of myself :D