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Excited to see AOC back and I think it was a solid idea to get rid of the global leaderboard. We (Depot) are sponsoring this year and have a private leaderboard [0]. We’re donating $1k/each for the top five finishers to a charity of their choice. [0] https://depot.dev/events/advent-of-code-2025
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> By measuring it as a race, it becomes a race, and now the goal is the metric. It becomes a race when you start seeing it as a race :) One can just... ignore the leaderboard
I disagree. Having a leaderboard also leaks into the puzzle design. So the experience is different, even if you choose to ignore the leaderboard as a participant.
> Having a leaderboard also leaks into the puzzle design.
Does anyone know about any good sysadmin advent?
I propose Advent of Outage: just pull a random plug in the server room every day.
while [1]; do kill -9 $((rnd * 100000)); sleep 5; end
On a serious note, I just saw this: https://linuxupskillchallenge.org
I support the no global leaderboard. I was in 7th place last year but quickly got bored maintaining the aggressive AI pipeline required to achieve that. If I wanted to maintain pipelines I'd just do work, and there will never be a good way to prevent people from using AI like this. Advent of Code should be fun, thank you for continuing to do it. I'm looking forward to casually playing this year!
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241201070128/https://adventofc...
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I’ve been doing them is JS and Common Lisp. I recommend the problems to help learning new languages.
I respect the effort going into making Advent of Code but with the very heavy emphasis on string parsing, I'm not convinced it's a good way to learn most languages. Most problems are 80%-90% massaging the input with a little data modeling which you might have to rethink for the second part and algorithms used to play a significant role only in the last few days. That heavily favours languages which make manipulating…
Sure Haskell comes packaged with parser combinators, but a new user having to juggle immutability, IO and monads all at once at the same time will be almost certainly impossible.
In the IEEEXTREME university programming competition there are ~10k participating teams.
Our university has a quite strong Competitive Programming program and the best teams usually rank in the top 100. Last year a team ranked 30 and it's wasn't even our strongest team (which didn't participate)
This year none of our teams was able to get in the top 1000. I would estimate close to 99% of the teams in the Top 1000 were using LLMs.
Last year they didn't seem to help much, but this year they rendered the competition pointless.
I've read blogs/seen videos of people who got in the AOC global leaderboard last year without using LLMs, but I think this year it wouldn't be possible at all.
I support the no global leaderboard. I was in 7th place last year but quickly got bored maintaining the aggressive AI pipeline required to achieve that. If I wanted to maintain pipelines I'd just do work, and there will never be a good way to prevent people from using AI like this. Advent of Code should be fun, thank you for continuing to do it. I'm looking forward to casually playing this year!
It was pretty boring trying to place against aggressive AI pipelines like yours throughout the explicit requests not to use them[1]. I’m sorry to hear it became boring for you too. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241201070128/https://adventofc...
Opinion poll: Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers. Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).