Advent

We’re about to start on Christmas Week, that week when Advent of Code’s most iconic puzzles are released. But today, we’re dealing with the aftermath of an exploding volcano.

They say “Pyroclastic Flow”, but it’s really Tetris. Rock Tetris. With 100,000,000 pieces. Massive.

The title says it all. It’s a “shortest path” puzzle, you’re meant to use Dijkstra’s algorithm, and the puzzle has no curve balls to toss at you.

This is the kind of puzzle I hate. Puzzles where even the best approach seems to take forever and it’s hard to wrap my head around the solution.

I thought, for my vacation, I’d have time to really dive deep into these puzzles. Instead, I’ve been buried deep in sand – much like the hapless victim in today’s puzzle.

I thought this was just a puzzle to see if I knew about modulo arithmetic… but then it turned into a puzzle about VERY LARGE NUMBERS! Also, why do I bother with Java?

Turns out the elves just really loved the Atari 2600 so much, they built their little handheld computers around them. And now it’s up to us to fix one.

The elves are crossing a bridge, but it is a really short bridge – in fact it is the shortest bridge possible. So what did the protagonist fall into when it snapped?

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.