The Advent of Code is an annual programming competition that takes place in the run-up to Christmas (between 1st December and 25th Decemeber), run by Eric Wastl. The challenges start off pretty easy (do-able by anyone who knows the basics of any programming langauge) but scale up in difficulty quickly. There is a leaderboard for the quickest time to solve problems globally (which has some insanely fast times), but I think the most fun is had as part of a private leaderboard between your friends. Unfortunately for those based in Europe, the problems are released at 5am UTC every day.
I took part last year and got up to Day 22 before I had to give up. I decided to stop the first time I didn’t/couldn’t solve a problem on the day that it was released. Here are my times on the days that I woke up at 5am to do the problem:
--------Part 1-------- --------Part 2--------
Day Time Rank Score Time Rank Score
22 01:06:29 1519 0 01:22:55 1322 0 [Started 15m late]
20 00:46:17 812 0 01:21:40 821 0
19 00:15:45 387 0 01:04:15 1065 0
18 00:42:51 2437 0 01:54:40 2434 0
17 00:47:14 1200 0 01:19:54 1474 0
16 00:27:13 1319 0 00:36:17 1382 0
11 00:15:43 1313 0 00:38:29 3126 0
10 00:16:16 324 0 00:48:15 319 0
4 00:05:35 948 0 00:10:04 361 0
1 00:03:34 1047 0 00:12:44 702 0
Also if you’re interested to see my solutions to the problems, then they’re available here on GitHub. I found that a lot of time could be saved by pre-coding simple functions to do most of the pre-processing for me. That’s probably what I’ll work on before this year’s set of problems. I encourage everyone who knows how to code to take part this year (in circa 10 months)!
Coding
