Same thing as most years: I did not intend to participate, but here I am at day 12... I've not committed the solutions to git every day, I will commit in batches, and there will be no code cleanup. I will also quit when the puzzles start taking too much time.
I participated in 2022, but I never pushed the solutions. I did however find them on my HD, so I will push them now as is.
Here we go ...
I promised myself to not engage in Advent of Code this year, given how many late, sleepless nights it caused last year. And yet here I am, on day 2. This year I've at least decided that I will use a language I'm really comfortable with (Python 3).
So I decided to pick this up Advent of Code again this year. I started on the 10:th of december and have been doing on average about 2 puzzles (4 stars) per day.
Up until today I've not run into big problems, but the second part of day 16 is tricky to solve in reasonable time. So this was the first time I had to read up on some ideas from Reddit, and my solution is still not quite there yet.
For this year I've decided to use Go to for all tasks. I've never used Go before so it took some time getting up to speed. The language is very simplistic however, which made it easy to learn, but I also think it was a bad choice for this type of computing task with a big focus on algorithms.
This day was a really tough one: at first I ran into problems getting example 4 and the puzzle input to solve in reasonable time. But most annoyingly, after solving that, the solution for the puzzle input was too high. I spent way too long time debugging this and seeking advice on the AoC Reddit, before I reread the instruction for the 100th time: turns out I looked for the shortest path to visit all keys and doors, while the task was to just visit all keys, not doors.
As I struggled with the exercise, I decided to retreat to Python, as I've more experience with that language and so I can think about the problem with less of a language overhead.
For Part 2, I consider all doors not having a key in the same quarter to be open, solve all the four squares and use the sum of the shortest path as answer.
The code for this day is nowhere near as clean as for most other days, and I've still not implemented a solution in Go. I might come back to clean it up later. Then again, maybe not...
First part of this day was no problem, but the second required some math that I was simply not able to figure out. After revisiting this day a couple of times I decided to give up on part 2 to be able to finish the whole calendar. So there's no solution for part 2, as I used Zedrdaves solution. 🤷♂️
Some solutions to Advent of Code 2017: