Are you playing along with Advent of Code? I got started a little late this year, so I’m doing a couple of days each day until I catch up.
The basis of Advent of Code isn’t so much the beauty of your code as it is the correctness. Because of this, a lot of my code is hideously ugly, with design choices best described as “questionable”. For example, at one point, I used flatMap.count
on returned optionals instead of returning zeroes and ones and reducing them with +
. I’m using Swift because that’s the language that’s currently dominant in my brain, although a lot of the memory manipulation would have been easier with straight C.
I wanted to share my solution for the first half of day 3. The challenge stipulates a squared spiral pattern of numbers in a grid and then asks you to calculate the distance from each number to the center. The approach I came up with for part I proved completely useless for the second half of day 3, where I had to start over from scratch. (Normally, you just modify the first code with an extra function and you go from part I to part II pretty easily.)
I took a road with part I that really didn’t fit the mindset of the challenge givers. For me, I was thinking geometrically, noticing that this was a degenerate case of a series of concentric circles. However instead of calculating the distance with a sin-cos solution, the concentric squares created a stepped triangle wave instead. Because of this, I built my solution to traverse the triangle wave and deduce the distance as the radius + the phase of the wave for any given number.
I thought I’d share my code for this because it’s pretty short and I think it’s pretty unusual for the problem domain.
for n in [1024, 12, 23, 312051] { for i in sequence(first: 1, next: { $0 + 2 }) { // Find least bounding square that contains number let boundingSize = i * i if boundingSize >= n { // Start of the outer edge sequence let firstValue = (i - 2) * (i - 2) + 1 // Calculate distance to center let radius = (i - 1) / 2 // The first number is always positioned at the // bottom right, one up from the bottom var current = radius - 1 // The `direction` differential is the basis of // the triangle wave generator. It flips at the // minimum (-radius) and maximum (radius) offsets var direction = -1 // One trip through the outer edge will be // sufficient to find the value for value in firstValue ... boundingSize { if value == n { print("Result for \(n) is \(radius + abs(current))") break } // Generate the next value in the triangle // wave pattern to determine the distance // from the center current += direction if abs(current) == radius { direction *= -1 } } break } } }
Needless to say, my solution for part II had nothing to do with this wave approach. Instead, I actually constructed the 2D array, populated it with numbers and then used those as an addressing scheme to collect sums. Outside the addressing, it was basically applying a 3×3 sum filter in an address-driven convolution. Much longer, not pretty, but reasonably effective.
In the end, if I had done my “fill then look up locations” approach I used for part II for the first puzzle, it would have provided a much quicker solution although I don’t think it would have been as short or, in my opinion, nifty.
What approach did you end up using for day 3? And what made you go with that design?