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Excited for this year's version. I did last year's event in OCaml which was a challenging, yet very rewarding experience. Still trying to decide what language to use this year.
Interesting choice. What made you want to learn Ocaml?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account
That doesn't help - time is counted from midnight, so if you solve the problem on one account and then another, the second account will have a strictly worse time. About all it can really do is mess with the score distribution. Also, the input data for each problem is randomized per user, so you really do need a proper programmatic solution (i.e. simply copying another person's answer is unlikely to work).
(Please don't do this!)
Excited for this year's version. I did last year's event in OCaml which was a challenging, yet very rewarding experience. Still trying to decide what language to use this year.
I'm going to do Rust.
I did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod... )
I'm one of the people who solved problems very quickly (3rd overall last year). I'm somewhat competitive by nature, and I did ACM programming challenges in undergrad (although I was never good enough to make the local team, heh). Happy to answer any questions you might have about "competitive" AoC; it's fun in a very different way than learning new languages for the competition. I personally used Python for the last…
I got a bit too invested in this last year. I even did a write up of one of the tasks. That year I did it all using JS since it's easy to write input parsers with it. This year I'll be doing it in Rust to stretch myself a little. https://qubyte.codes/blog/advent-of-code-2017-day-20-task-2
2017 I solved in kotlin and got all the way to the end. I remember closing my laptop on Christmas Day and feeling elated/tired
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm one of the people who solved problems very quickly (3rd overall last year). I'm somewhat competitive by nature, and I did ACM programming challenges in undergrad (although I was never good enough to make the local team, heh). Happy to answer any questions you might have about "competitive" AoC; it's fun in a very different way than learning new languages for the competition. I personally used Python for the last…
For day 3 in 2017, the spiral. Were you just aware of this concept before hand?
I did the AoC last year for the first time and was amazed how quickly some participants solved the puzzles, e.g. http://howtowriteaprogram.blogspot.com/2017/12/advent-of-cod... )
Never rule out people cheating. Solving it on one account then doing it again in another account
Forget the code challenges for a minute, and just look at that beautiful font and text-shadow combination on the logo.
(Update) The "high contrast" CSS style they provide is more readable, but I'm sure it should be possible to create a dark style where readability doesn't suffer that much. That font is just not the best choice.
I'm just curious about why this is billed as an Advent calendar, when really the only thing it has in common with an Advent calendar is that it terminates on Christmas.
Is there anything about it that has anything to do with Advent, i.e. the Christian liturgical season that precedes Christmas?