this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
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Maybe it was due to attempting the puzzles in real-time for the first time, but it felt like there was quite a spike in difficulty this year. Day 5 (If You Give A Seed A Fertilizer) in particular was pretty tough for an early puzzle.
Day 8 (Haunted Wasteland), Day 20 (Pulse Propagation) and Day 21 (Step Counter) were (I felt) a bit mean due to hidden properties of the input data.
I particularly liked Day 6 (Wait For It), Day 14 (Parabolic Reflector Dish) and Day 24 (Never Tell Me The Odds), although that one made my brain hurt.
Day 25 (Snowverload) had me reading research papers, although in the end I stumbled across Karger's algorithm. That's the first time I've used a probabilistic approach. This solution in particular was very clever.
I learned the Shoelace formula and Pick's theorem this year, which will be very helpful to remember.
Perhaps I'll try using Prolog or J next year :)
Pick is certainly very nice!