Motivation⌗

I always like solving problems and this is a very nice place to practise my skills. This year, I would like to learn more concepts and I’m already liking this AOC. For starters, we have a lot of participation and people are streaming when they’re solving the puzzles. I like the way Jonathan Paulson’s videos are done. They are precise and really nice to see. He’s fast too and that makes me want to look and think through a puzzle with his level of understanding and speed. I also like Liz Fong-Jones’ Go solutions. My solutions are over here.

Day 9⌗

The IntCode makes a come back but we are prepared 🍴! I liked this puzzle because in as much as you needed to rethink how you fetch the modes, that was all there was. In the second part it was a matter of changing the inputs and boom! Very easy and almost, just the way I like it.

For me, I have the most of this IntCode solutions in Python. What I would like to do is to port it to Go.

Day 8⌗

Decoding the image data was pretty easy. It involved array manipulation so from a higher level you can see the kind of problem that you have and the way the ideal solution needs to look like. For my case, I knew that I need a way to keep layers, which I did using a dict. To find the layer with the most common zeros, I used Python’s collections.Counter to find the count of value 0 and set the lowest value for each layer. Pretty easy.

For the second part, I looped through the size of an image (width * height) and then the value which is not 2 in a second loop through the layers. This enabled me to look at the previous layer data as I went through looking for a pixel value that’s not 2.

Printing the value to get what text it looks like was an awesome task. I got this:

####.###..####.#..#.###..
#....#..#....#.#..#.#..#.
###..###....#..#..#.#..#.
#....#..#..#...#..#.###..
#....#..#.#....#..#.#.#..
####.###..####..##..#..#.

Looking towards day #9!

Day 7⌗

Amplifiers! This puzzle builds up from the day 5 IntCode puzzle. There’s multi processing in part 2 which really had me in a mind blown state. For some reason which I don’t know I just find it difficult understanding the int code puzzles. I managed to do the first part but translating that to part 2 became a bit of a challenge. One thing I learnt how to tackle it was to make the code I’m running more clear. I came across a solution by alcatrazEscapee and reading through his code made me understand the puzzle even better. I hope day 8 is easy on me :laugh:.

Day 6⌗

Yay! A simple puzzle. We had ourselves a tree and traversals. This was a bit easy to do. Also, the illustrations make it really easy to think through your solutions.

Day 5⌗

Good Lord! This is by far the most difficult of the puzzles. For starters, it uses day 2’s code. Then the theory is just a lot. My brain got lost for a couple of hours here. I finally followed Jonathan Paulson’s steps and managed to finesse it. Sigh

Day 1 - 4⌗

These exercises were pretty simple and straightforward. Day 1 exercises involved summing values, pretty easy. Day 2 had some splitting values given a certain step and then doing different arithmetic and end up with a final value. That was pretty easy to do too.

Day 3 came with Manhattan distance. Owh, this one was nice… I’m still unable to do the visualizations and it’s one thing that I found out people are doing with their solutions. It’s fantastic seeing people doing these.

Day 4 was brute force day. Genarating values in a given range and using different criteria to determine the values you need and then make a final value.