Advent Of Code

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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev!

Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

AoC 2023

Solution Threads

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console.log('Hello World')

founded 1 year ago

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🍪 - 2023 DAY 14 SOLUTIONS -🍪 (programming.dev)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Ategon@programming.dev to c/advent_of_code@programming.dev

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Day 14: Parabolic Reflector Dish

Megathread guidelines

Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
Code block support is not fully rolled out yet but likely will be in the middle of the event. Try to share solutions as both code blocks and using something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ , pastebin, or github (code blocks to future proof it for when 0.19 comes out and since code blocks currently function in some apps and some instances as well if they are running a 0.19 beta)

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[–] cacheson@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

Nim

Getting caught up slowly after spending way too long on day 12. I'll be busy this weekend though, so I'll probably fall further behind.

Part 2 looked daunting at first, as I knew brute-forcing 1 billion iterations wouldn't be practical. I did some premature optimization anyway, pre-calculating north/south and east/west runs in which the round rocks would be able to travel.

At first I figured maybe the rocks would eventually reach a stable configuration, so I added a check to detect if the current iteration matches the previous one. It never triggered, so I dumped some of the grid states and it became obvious that there was a cycle occurring. I probably should have guessed this in advance. The spin cycle is effectively a pseudorandom number generator, and all PRNGs eventually cycle. Good PRNGs have a very long cycle length, but this one isn't very good.

I added a hash table, mapping the state of each iteration to the next one. Once a value is added that already exists in the table as a key, there's a complete cycle. At that point it's just a matter of walking the cycle to determine it's length, and calculating from there.