Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Advent of Code 2019
91–100 of 124 posts
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#92I'm trying to use J and still struggle with the second part of day 1. Any other J users?
If you haven't already found the discussion, Reddit is very active and very helpful. Seems to be the primary water cooler for the event.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#93Advent of Code is a lot of fun! Last year I wrote a little bit about all the different languages/approaches people use to solve the challenges: https://j11g.com/2018/12/03/advent-of-code/
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#94Eric, the author, says he won't accept any puzzle submissions because of attribution and legal issues. This seems like the wrong outcome for people who want to make the site better but don't want credit, compensation, or attribution. Has anyone seen a site using an IP assignment agreement which is the equivalent of "take my work, I don't want credit, and it's just for your site"? The Creative Commons CC0 license come…
“your site” is really complicated. Who is “you”, person, website or the company? If it’s the person can they transfer the rights? What happens if they die? If they donate the estate? If they get hired or contracted? If the website expands scope or changes in any way?
"You" would be the company, and the submitter would assign all the rights to it. Interestingly, I looked and couldn't find any terms of service or company name.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#95If someone is interested in the previous years of Advent of Code they are available as notebooks in Peter Norvig's pytudes repository: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
Thank you very much for this!
I was aware of Norvig's 2016 AoC solutions, but I thought he never did any of the newer editions. I know what I'll be reading today :)
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#96Many 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…
> Many people (including myself) use these as an opportunity to try out learning a new language
I hadn't thought about that! I'll take this as an opportunity to learn Rust!
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#97Self promotion, but as this is my first year doing advent of code I'm solving all of the problems using awk[1], the solutions will be published here[2] [1]: https://man.openbsd.org/awk [2]: https://jo.ie/advent-of-awk-2019.html
As someone using a completely mainstream and normal language (well, Rust), I salute you.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#98Always 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 hit day 15 and stopped last year. There always seems to be one puzzle which is so irritating it no longer seems worthwhile when I could be playing some music or building something in Minecraft or just lazing around on the sofa with the cat.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#99Jeez, tension is real. Specially if you are thinking about cracking top 100. Competition is a b . Lot of fun though.
That's only possible if you live in the correct time zone, too.
Re: Advent of Code 2019
#100Many 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…
Good idea.
I have used http://www.https://cryptopals.com/ for a similar purpose, with the added benefit of learning about cryptography as a parallel outcome.