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Advent of Code 2025

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Re: Advent of Code 2025

#291

Post by gardenhedge »

deergomoo wrote: post #225

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

Agreed. I have a CS background and years of experience but I don't get very far with these. At some point it becomes a very large time commitment as well which I don't have

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#292

Post by eshse »

noirscape wrote: post #69

Taking out the public leaderboard makes sense imo. Even when you don't consider the LLM problem, the public Leaderboard's design was never really suited for anyone outside of the very specific short list of (US) timezones where competing for a quick solution was every feasible. One thing I do think would be interesting is to see solution rate per hour block . It'd give an indication of how popular advent of code is a…

I live in Sweden nowadays (UTC+1) and it starts at 6am so last year I woke up at 5:30, grabbed a coffee, and gave it a go.

Got nowhere near the leaderboard times so gave up after four days!

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#293

Post by 0xedd »

Barrin92 wrote: post #284
mattbillenstein wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realize in anything, there are people who are much better than even the very best. The people doing official collegiate level competitive programming would find AoC problems pretty easy.

>The people doing official collegiate level competitive programming would find AoC problems pretty easy. I used to program competitively and while that's the case for a lot of the early day problems, usually a few on the later days are pretty tough even by those standards. Don't take it from me, you can look at the finishing times over the years. I just looked at some today because I was going through the earlier yea…

[dead]

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#294

Post by paddim8 »

fainpul wrote: post #20

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 used my homemade shell language last year, called elk shell. It worked surprisingly well, better than other languages I've tried, because unlike other shell languages it is just a regular general purpose scripting language with a standard library that can also run programs with the same syntax as function calls.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#296

Post by mnafees »

I love Advent of Code! I have used previous years' problems for my guest lectures to Computer Science students and they have all enjoyed those more than a traditional algorithmic lecture.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#297

Post by [deleted] »

byearthithatius wrote: post #267
ryandv wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They... sort of are though? A year or two ago I just waited until the very last problem, which was min-cut. Anybody with a computer science education who has seen the prompt Proof. before should be able to tackle this one with some effort, guidance, and/or sufficient time. There are algorithms that don't even require all the high-falutin graph theory. I don't mean to say my solution was good, nor was it performant in…

You say in your comment: "Anybody with a computer science education ... should be able to tackle this one" which is directly opposed to what they advertise: "You don't need a computer science background to participate"

[deleted]

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#298

Post by TiredOfLife »

alexfoo wrote: post #227
deergomoo wrote: post #225

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

Got to agree. I'm even surprised at just how little progress many of my friends and ex-colleagues over the years make given that they hold down reasonable developer jobs.

Because like 80% of AoC problems require deep Computer science background and deeply specific algorithms almost nobody is using in their day to day work.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#299

Post by josephg »

duxup wrote: post #285
deergomoo wrote: post #225

> You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Every time I see this I wonder how many amateur/hobbyist programmers it sets up for disappointment. Unless your definition of “pretty far” is “a small number of the part ones”, it’s simply not true.

On sorta the same topic: In the programming world I feel like there's a lot of info "for beginners" and a lot of folks / activities for experts. But that middle ground world is strange... a lot of it is a combo of filling in "basics" and also touching more advanced topics at the same time and the amount of content and just activities filling that in seems very low. I get it though, the middle ground skilled audience…

This is also true of a lot of other disciplines. I’ve been learning filmmaking lately (and editing, colour science, etc). There’s functionally infinite beginner friendly videos online on anything you can imagine. But very little content that slowly teaches the fundamentals, or presents intermediate skills. It’s all “Here’s 5 pieces of gear you need!” “One trick that will make your lighting better”. But that’s mostly it. There’s almost no intermediate stuff. No 3 hour videos explaining in detail how to set up an interview properly. Stuff like that.

Re: Advent of Code 2025

#300

Post by Aissen »

wging wrote: post #144
incognito124 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, one of the competitive programming experts from the global leaderboard made his own language, specifically tailored to help solve AoC problems: https://github.com/betaveros/noulith

Yes (or so I thought too!), but apparently no: https://blog.vero.site/post/noulith (post title: "Designing a Programming Language to Speedrun Advent of Code", but starts off "The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out that the programming language I was working on fit the task remarkably wel…

It's still very domain-oriented:

> I solve and write a lot of puzzlehunts, and I wanted a better programming language to use to search word lists for words satisfying unusual constraints, such as, “Find all ten-letter words that contain each of the letters A, B, and C exactly once and that have the ninth letter K.”1 I have a folder of ten-line scripts of this kind, mostly Python, and I thought there was surely a better way to do this.

I'll chose to remember it was designed for AoC :-D

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