Advent of Code

It’s all about taking a break from those busy reindeer games to build a treehouse with a really stellar view. Also, what is code golf?

Today’s coding challenge was, “Make a file system without making a file system!” I failed that task.

What is probably the first puzzle in the theme for the rest of Advent of Code started today… with the easiest puzzle so far.

The promised difficulty boost for Day 5 failed to materialize, instead being largely a puzzle about reading formatted input.

As well as my Day 4 solutions in Python and Java, I talk about the AI solving controversy in Advent of Code, and teach the chat bot to speak a language I just now invented.

I did this puzzle last night while writing the post about Day 2. This time I’m not in quite so much of a rush. Weekends. The puzzle description is best read on the AoC site – they’re always fun to read :-) Advent of Code always starts out slowly, getting people used to how things go before they start pouring on the hard stuff. You can see some concepts come up that will undoubtedly become key in later puzzles. Yesterday was modulo arithmetic. Today was sets. Naturally, people did it their own ways, but typically the fast solvers will immediately focus in on the concept being introduced and doing their thing in seconds. ...

So I made it to day 2 of Advent of Code! Not entirely awake. I stayed up past midnight to solve it. I messed up my first approach, so I went to a more brute force approach that worked. I got my solution logged in in about twelve minutes or so? But I was still 8,000 positions from the leaderboard, so… yeah, I don’t really think I need to be staying up late to get the puzzle the moment it drops. ...

I am committing myself this year to solving every puzzle in the Advent of Code, an annual coding competition taking place over the Advent season each year. Each day brings a new puzzle, in two parts. They start out pretty easy, and top programmers (not me) solve them in seconds. By the end of the challenge, top programmers can take even half an hour to solve a puzzle. Me, I’ll take hours. ...

Advent of Code 2022 is just around the corner, and with it comes new challenges, new technologies, and new ways to have fun programming. Plus, Tactics Ogre: Reborn is almost finished, and Cyberpunk 2077 is waiting for me to dive in. And don’t forget about the Gotham Knight Knews update, featuring Starro for four-player coop, and the new GPT-3 language model. And exclusive Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special spoilers!

It was an obsession, it was a challenge, it was a lesson. The Advent of Code is an annual coding event that runs from the first to the twenty-fifth of December, but instead of chocolate treats, this advent calendar delivers delicious daily coding puzzles… although you don’t necessarily need to code to solve them. (The header image is from the Python Discord.) My family thinks I was insane for doing this. And toward the end, I pretty much agreed with them. The last weekend was grueling, and I spent most of the last weekend before Christmas trying to solve particularly twisty puzzles. A lot of people dropped off at that point. ...