redesigned-chainsaw

Redesigned Chainsaw

Advent of Code 2021

Some exercises in programming for 2021

Day 00

Overzealous attempts at trying to relearn idiomatic Go by trying to define reusable interfaces.

Day 01

About four hours of struggling with trying to do things properly (and doing it wrong), followed by around thirty minutes beating zap into submission interspersed with about fifteen minutes of actually solving the puzzle.

There's a lesson to be learned there.

Day 02

Nothing much to think about. Could probably run faster with some tweaking of the bufio.Scanner, but that's really not worth any effort. Also, tests weren't really necessary here.

I've learned yesterday's lesson, for now.

Day 03

The mention of bits was a huge red herring and flipping strings was the easiest. Not having a reduce function also was a bit of a pain in the ass and probably something worth learning. Having to drop slices ends up triggering the garbage collector quite often.

Day 04

Coming up with the data structures for easy access took quite a bit of figuring out. As well as how the Reader in the encoding/csv package works. Also learned that you can't change bufio.Split functions after using it to bufio.Scan(). Still haven't figured out if it's possible to get a new scanner at the position where you left the other, but this worked.

Also, realising that more boards can win per roun/d.

Day 05

Probably could have tested for validity of the lines better. Reused functions from the get-go. 2D-Slice indices are tricky. Test your assumptions on the meaning of 'diagonal'

Day 06

Very much tempted to do it with a container.ring or container.list, but just went with the slice and shift and push its contents around. No time to do it in the morning, but pretty much done in a jiffy in the evening. After reading the description, it quickly became clear it would explode and modeling the cycle would be the way to go. It's basically a ring with a little run up tail, like a lowercase sigma.

day 07

Tempting to implement a solve through smart computation, but in the end the best way was just to go over all the possible values.