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Advent of Code 2020 - a journal

Staying up until midnight to

Personal Stats

--------Part 1--------       --------Part 2--------
Day Time       Rank  Score   Time       Rank  Score
6   09:10:03  35364      0   09:32:16  33377      0
5   00:20:51   3783      0   00:30:28   3889      0
4   00:19:57   3989      0   00:57:37   4019      0
3   00:33:39   6833      0   00:41:09   6119      0
2   00:17:53   4024      0   00:27:31   4161      0
1   10:35:04  38878      0   10:36:37  35346      0

Day 1

Got reminded of it late.

Day 2

Mind immediately went to the re module. If there was ever an opportunity for me to make it to the main leaderboard it would've been today. And I was still no where close.

Day 3

Day 4

Oh boy! Day 4 is where I start to get in trouble. Disclaimer: I sort of cheated. I knew I was only off by one and my code was too much spaghetti to find my mistake, so I just entered the right answer without working code.

I went with a brute force approach with regexp and if conditions. In hindsight I could have replaced all the if statements with better regexp.

I'm going to want to come back to this one.

Day 5

Did a lousy job parsing the puzzle...both parts. It wasn't until about halfway through my solution that I realized I could do it without all the dumb array stuff I was doing. There was a simple, math based solution. But I continued on the path I was on.

This sentence in part 2:

Your seat wasn't at the very front or back, though; the seats with IDs +1 and -1 from yours will be in your list.

Was difficulty for me to parse. I couldn't understand what it was trying to tell me. So I just printed the available seats and hoped one would stand out to me. One did. The result also illuminated the sentence.

Things I learned in day 5:

  • I don't parse the puzzles well and this leads me to bad solutions

Day 6

It is better to sleep in that obsess about the private leaderboard. But Day 6 fun. I thought my solution was easy, didn't turn out so easy. I learned somethings about sets I didn't previously know discard("some value").
And I changed my data file reading to match what I saw people doing in day 4, and it really helped me here.

Things I learned in day 6:

  • I don't think as clearly when I have company.