this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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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
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 |
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console.log('Hello World')
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Nim
Part 1 was just a simple search. Part 2 looked like it just needed a trivial modification, but with the removal of the one-way tiles, the result I was getting was getting for the example was too large. I switched to a different method of determining the path length, but didn't yet figure out what what I had been doing wrong. Since the search space was now significantly larger, my part 2 code took almost an hour to come up with the answer.
I rewrote part 2 to simplify the maze into a graph with a node for each intersection and for the start and goal tiles, with edge costs equal to the path length between each. This resulted in significantly faster iteration (17 seconds instead of 52 minutes), but didn't actually reduce the search space. I'm assuming there's some clever optimization that can be done here, but I'm not sure what it is.
The rewrite was still getting the wrong answer, though. I eventually figured out that it was including paths that didn't actually reach the goal, as long as they didn't revisit any nodes. I changed my recursive search function to return a large negative result at dead ends, which fixed the issue.