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Advent of Code 2019

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21–30 of 124 posts

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#21

Post by wycy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #5

Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles

Day 15 was terrible for me too. The edge condition I missed was that you could both move and attack in a single turn. It only changed the outcome for me in part 2. I was only able to finally debug it by comparing debug outputs every step with a known-good solution.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#25

Post by klemenk »

aquova wrote: post #14

Many of the comments are about the event as a whole, but I'd like to commend the author for the day 1 puzzle, which I think is very cleverly written. Many people (including myself) use these as an opportunity to try out learning a new language, and the first puzzle does a good job of making sure you know enough basic operations for some of the puzzles coming up. The puzzle itself wasn't very difficult, you could do i…

You can watch authors talk about how he prepares challenges and other challenges he had with AoC :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gibVyxpi-qA&feature=emb_titl...

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#26

Post by m000 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #5

Always enjoy doing these but there was one last year that nearly broke me. I think it was day15. It was the worst combination of mind-numbing coding and horribly hard to debug special cases. It was purely convoluted with very little to think about which makes for the worst kind of puzzles

I strongly disliked the puzzles that quickly devolved to correctly handling a ton of corner cases. 15 and 17 were both in this category. What's the fun in that? This is like the boring part of being a developer. Without the payment that goes with being a developer.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#27

Post by melling »

aquova wrote: post #14

Many of the comments are about the event as a whole, but I'd like to commend the author for the day 1 puzzle, which I think is very cleverly written. Many people (including myself) use these as an opportunity to try out learning a new language, and the first puzzle does a good job of making sure you know enough basic operations for some of the puzzles coming up. The puzzle itself wasn't very difficult, you could do i…

Learning new environments can be painful so it’s good it starts off easy.

I’m trying to solve them with Swift Playgrounds on the iPad, for example. And I can’t figure out how to create a simple text file for the data.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#28

Post by jammygit »

These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average?

Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#30

Post by j1elo »

jammygit wrote: post #28

These are daily programming puzzles? How long do they take on average? Also, I know somebody who is just starting out at coding. Would it be too hard for them? They are brand new, learning about loops

I wondered the same, also thinking about people I know who are starting to program.

In the end I think it's not a good fit, given that basic concepts are still being understood, and the mere task of reading a file and iterating over the lines, even the concept itself of what "iterating" is, is already a big challenge...

Trying is free and won't hurt, though, so why not :)

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