My attempt at the 25*2 challenges from the 2024 Advent of Code challenge.
I'd like to continue where I left off last year, so here are essentially the same aims I had last time:
- No help from friends/colleagues/Reddit/etc. - I need to work out a solution on my own to all the challenges.
- I can do any non-Advent of Code research I like, from looking up potential
algorithms, studying bits of mathematics, snippets from Stack Overflow, etc.
- Edit: other than Python library documentation, I didn't need to do any additional research this year.
- No AI.
- Final solutions should run in sub-15s and I'll rework where I can to make that
happen,
but accept it probably won't be possible for all 25 days.
| Days | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 |
| Time | 61 | 73 | 57 | 75 | 80 | 1920 | 2815 | 42 | 2106 | 51 | 294 | 1988 | 1241 |
| Days | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 | 🌟 |
| Time | 769 | 142 | 304 | 53 | 774 | 480 | 2133 | 49 | 2735 | 49 | 60 | 82 |
⭐ means just the first star, 🌟 means both stars, and 🍮 (just because "custard" showed up while searching for emojis with "star" in the name) means no stars and the day is in the past. I suspect I'll be very behind the daily-rate, as the days get busier through December...
Times to run are just one example run, in milliseconds (unless specified otherwise).
While completing the challenges, I was trying to keep performance to a "good" level - not just sub-15s, but as optimal as I could manage, on my own. Notes on this are below:
- Day 19: my initial solution started at 5.5s - good but the slowest for the year so far. New idea upon new idea, for once, just kept improving the time which felt unusual for me - next was 3.5s, then 813ms, then finally 480ms. I've put all three (I never kept one of the intermediate ones) significantly different implementations in the repo.
- Sub-20s overall was an unexpected reward from this year!