I'm occasionally, slowly, doing puzzles from old #AdventOfCode years - one day I'll collect the full set! Everyone needs a hobby, right? Just collected the 50th star for the 2016 puzzles, I'm very pleased :) github.com/neil-vass/ad... - ThreadSky

neil-vass.com • 39 days ago

I'm occasionally, slowly, doing puzzles from old #AdventOfCode years - one day I'll collect the full set! Everyone needs a hobby, right?

Just collected the 50th star for the 2016 puzzles, I'm very pleased :)

https://github.com/neil-vass/advent-of-code-2016

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kelceyswain.com•38 days ago

Don't you just love that feeling of "oh, my solution won't finish part 2 before the heat death of the universe"?

neil-vass.com•38 days ago

Ha, always entertaining.

The shorter the part 2 description is, the more trouble I'm likely to be in. "Just do the same thing, except 50 more times"

dcbriccetti.bsky.social•39 days ago

What do you do when you find a puzzle you just can’t figure out how to solve? Or are you strong enough that answers to the puzzles just naturally come to you?

neil-vass.com•39 days ago

In past years I've been stuck lots - it's helpful to google the general principle of the problem ("find area of a polygon given vertices", "find best path through a maze") and see if some famous branch of maths/computing I've never heard of turns up. Often answer is "Dijkstra's algorithm, except..."

neil-vass.com•39 days ago

That's lead me to read/practice all kinds of things, some notes in the "Things I've learned from past years" section here:

https://neil-vass.com/some-things-i-love-about-advent-of-code/

neil-vass.com•39 days ago

Occasionally I'm _really_ stuck and go looking for other people's hints (the subreddit is great for this). In past years people have said things like "for this you need dynamic programming" and I've been sent off on quite a quest to find out what that means. Blog post on that topic coming soon...

neil-vass.com•36 days ago

Here's that blog post, about dynamic programming and other things:

https://bsky.app/profile/neil-vass.com/post/3lgagv2i5ek2e

neil-vass.com•39 days ago

In this 2016 set, there was just one puzzle where I had to look for a hint. I'd felt I was getting the hang of these after several years but was stumped on this one.

Not just me apparently:
”Having since read through some of the AoC subreddit I can see that this is an _infamous_ AoC day puzzle”

gmmapowell.bsky.social•39 days ago

I remember a friend of mine complaining about that one. I think he said he hacked part 1 but was then down a hole with part 2.

But I could have misunderstood...

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