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).
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:
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…
LLMs spoiled it, but it was fun to see the genuine top times. Watching competitive coders solve in real time is interesting (Youtube videos), and i wouldn't have discovered these without the leader board.
> Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles? No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind. And yet I expect…
Depends how you look at it. Some of my colleagues rave about Claude Code, so I was thinking about trying it out on these puzzles. In that sense it is "going to the gym", just for a different thing. Since I do AoC every year, I feel like it'll give me a good feel for Claude Code compared to my baseline. And it's not just "prompting", but figuring out a workflow with tests and brainstorming and iteration and all that. I guess if the LLM can just one-shot every puzzle that's less interesting, but I suppose it would be good to know it can do that...
I agree. Didn't these puzzles ruin interviewing for many years now. AI came along and they're still doing it. Some things will needlessly drag on before they die I guess
By the same token, AI came along and we all still have intelligence, needless, eh? I mean people reading and writing stuff has nothing to do with AI. I don't see how some people see everything as a zero-sum game.
All AI is doing is solving these puzzles, which proves they don't need any form of intelligence. You're wrong for associating AI with human intelligence. It will never happen. It might be faked once, like the moon landing, but that's it.
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 always used AoC as my jump-off point for new languages. I was thinking about using Gleam this year! I wish I had more profound reasons, but the pipeline syntax is intriguing and I just want to give it a whirl.
That's a perfectly valid reason.
I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.
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).
AoC has been a highlight of the season for me since the beginning in 2015. I experimented with many languages over the years, zeroing in on Haskell, then Miranda as my language of choice. Finally, I decided to write my own language to do AoC, and created Admiran (based upon Miranda and other lazy, pure, functional languages) with its own self-hosted compiler and library of functional data structures that are useful in AoC puzzles:
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 like to use Haskell, because parser combinators usually make the input parsing aspect of the puzzles extremely straightforward. In addition, the focus of the language on laziness and recursion can lead to some very concise yet idiomatic solutions. Example: find the first example for when this "game of life" variant has more than 1000 cells in the "alive" state. Solution: generate infinite list of all states and ite…
Does this solution copy the state on each iteration?