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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).
Small anecdote: 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…
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If enough inputs are available online, someone can presumably collect them and clone the entire project without having access to the puzzle input generation code, which is the "secret sauce" of the project.
Are you saying that we all have different inputs? I've never actually checked that, but I don't think it's true. My colleagues have gotten stuck in the same places and have mentioned aspects of puzzles and input characteristics and never spoken past each other. I feel like if we had different inputs we'd have noticed by now.
I have a solve group that calls it "Advent of Input Roulette" because (back when there was a global leaderboard) you can definitely get a better expected score by just assuming your input is weak in structural ways.
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).
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I did a post [0] about this last year, and vanilla LLMs didn’t do nearly as well as I’d expected on advent of code, though I’d be curious to try this again with Claude code and codex [0] https://www.jerpint.io/blog/2024-12-30-advent-of-code-llms/
LLMs, and especially coding focused models, have come a very long way in the past year. The difference when working on larger tasks that require reasoning is night and day. In theory it would be very interesting to go back and retry the 2024 tasks, but those will likely have ended up in the training data by now...
It's true this was 4 months after AoC 2024 was out, so it may have been trained on the answer, but I think that's way too soon.
Day 3 in 2024 isn't a Math Olympiad tier problem or anything but it seems novel enough, and my prior experience with LLMs were that they were absolutely atrocious at assembler.
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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...
I mean, everyone else was using them too, how can you not? That was the name of the game if you wanted to be competitive in 2024. Not using them would be like trying to do competitive pro cycling without steroids, basically impossible.
Huge thanks to those involved!
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Are you saying that we all have different inputs? I've never actually checked that, but I don't think it's true. My colleagues have gotten stuck in the same places and have mentioned aspects of puzzles and input characteristics and never spoken past each other. I feel like if we had different inputs we'd have noticed by now.
You do get different inputs, but they largely share characteristics so good solutions should always work and naive ones should consistently fail. There has been the odd puzzle where some inputs have allowed simpler solutions than others, but those have stood out.
if we just look at the last three puzzles: day 23 last year, for example, admitted the greedy solution but only for some inputs. greedy clearly shouldn't work (shuffling the vertices in a file that admits it causes it to fail).
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).
I've done some of the problems in R. Vectorized-by-default can avoid a lot of boilerplate. And for problems that aren't in R's happy path, I learn how to optimize in the language. And then I try to make those optimizations non-hideous to read.
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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...
I mean, everyone else was using them too, how can you not? That was the name of the game if you wanted to be competitive in 2024. Not using them would be like trying to do competitive pro cycling without steroids, basically impossible.