Advent of Code 2023

Advent of Code 2023 Scripts

D01 - Trebuchet?!

Part 1:

• Fun number extraction from string task.
• RegEx quickly solves single digit number identification.

Part 2:

• Increased difficulty due combined digit and word search in string.
• Crux: overlapping words have to be accounted for -> New-to-me concept: introduction to the RegEx concept of positive lookahead -> very useful.

D02 - Cube Conundrum

Part 1:

• Simple but actually surprisingly time-consuming number comparison task.

Part 2:

• If Challenge 1 has been set up elegantly, this is very simple: replace comparison operation with max() identification
• New-to-me tool: from functools import reduce, quickly apply operation on all elements of a list "bundled up" -> very powerful little function.

D03 - Gear Ratios

Part 1:

• 2D operations, visualised using plt.imshow()

Part 2:

• If Cha

• D04 - Scratcards

Part 1:

• 2D operations

Part 2:

• If Cha

D05 - If You Give A Seed A Fertilizer

Part 1:

• Time complexity problem - search algorithm - index extraction:
  • I chose a hashmap approach first which performed well on the small training input but could not scale to the massive ranges encountered in the puxxle input.
  • Learned more (again) about scalable search algorithms and chose a binary search approach -> while hashmap crashed after 15 min (after optimisation) binary search took 7.13 ms to finish.
  • use terminal-based execution of output_delete.py to erase the output of the crashed Notebook; otherwise the output is so massive that the entire JupyterLab cannot be loaded and you get a "Snap" error message.

Part 2:

• If Cha