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Advent of Code 2019

adventofcode.com

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Re: Advent of Code 2019

#81

Post by teraflop »

ken wrote: post #73
teraflop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completed the whole thing last year; the problems start out very easy, but get dramatically more challenging over the course of the month. Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018: https://adventofcode.com/2018/stats The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems requir…

> Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018 I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.

True; I would be interested in seeing the number of logged-in users who viewed and/or attempted each problem.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#82

Post by justin66 »

malloreon wrote: post #61
p1necone wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And?

if this is a religious project, it should be clearly marked as such. if it's not, why not use a nonreligious word?

> if this is a religious project, it should be clearly marked as such.

What an utterly strange proclamation. On every level: the notion that speech should not be free, the notion that users cannot be trusted to figure out what the project is about if it's not "clearly marked" in this way, the notion that there is some harm that can be done by such a "religious project" or a "religious word," whatever that even means.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#83

Post by bhrgunatha »

ken wrote: post #73
teraflop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completed the whole thing last year; the problems start out very easy, but get dramatically more challenging over the course of the month. Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018: https://adventofcode.com/2018/stats The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems requir…

> Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018 I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.

The scatterlpots [1] of the time taken for the leaderboard (top 100) to finish part 1 (silver) and part 2 (gold) are a better indicator of difficulty.

I'd like to see a plot of average (median or mode) to finish each part but only the site has all that information.

[1] http://www.maurits.vdschee.nl/scatterplot/

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#84

Post by duckarmada »

melling wrote: post #27
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.

I've been creating multiline strings and then just using components(separatedBy:)

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#85

Post by _v7gu »

tialaramex wrote: post #47
Jtsummers wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Day 15 [0] from last year. It was challenging, especially because there were so many rules to implement (in a short time). A slight misreading of the rules would let you pass all the provided examples, but fail on the real input. [0] https://adventofcode.com/2018/day/15

Idiot-proofing is hard. Figuring out everything people will get wrong is the only reliable way to ensure people don't, but that takes more insight than is needed to set and solve problems correctly.

It's not really the instructions, but having to implement an obviously imperative ruleset using Elixir. I completed the previous two years using Javascript and Ruby, and it's honestly much easier when you have access to imperative constructs. This year I'm using F#, we'll see how it goes.

Re: Advent of Code 2019

#87

Post by sa46 »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #83
ken wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018 I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.

The scatterlpots [1] of the time taken for the leaderboard (top 100) to finish part 1 (silver) and part 2 (gold) are a better indicator of difficulty. I'd like to see a plot of average (median or mode) to finish each part but only the site has all that information. [1] http://www.maurits.vdschee.nl/scatterplot/

Those box plots use horizontal jitter within individual boxes to better show overlapping points. That's a neat technique I haven't seen before.
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