aoc2015 VS AdventOfCode2019

When I solved this, I cheated .... and used the exact comment you linked to make my solution for part 2 really simple: it's just a direct calculation with the number of "parentheses" and "commas": https://github.com/ednl/aoc2015/blob/main/day19.py

That's a great simple way of doing gradient descent (ascent, in this case..). I added that to my explanation of the example, which was far too long and complicated: you don't need to limit the search space, just start in the middle! Obviously that's not something that will work in general, but the puzzle is well-behaved enough. They usually are.

Same with my version: https://github.com/ednl/aoc2015/blob/main/day05.py

You're correct! There are no time limits; in fact, you can work on any puzzle from any year, which means you can even start from the beginning of Advent of Code 2015 if you wanted to!

This is the seventh year puzzles, if you want to check out previous years take a look at: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of 50 stars!) it’s time for that writeup. Before I continue, I’d like to thank everyone on the subreddit who has helped me. I have a README.md for each day’s problem and you’ll find my thanks to those who helped me within those READMEs here in my repo.

The field is called "compiler design". Consider taking a course [1] or buying a book?

A somewhat more playful approach might be to complete the 2019 edition of Advent of Code [2], where you'll learn some preliminaries while implementing the Intcode interpreter.

[1] https://online.stanford.edu/courses/soe-ycscs1-compilers

[2] https://adventofcode.com/2019

The ending of Advent of Code 2019 was amazing. Well, the whole season was awesome, but the ending was amazing.

2019 in Rust

This is the seventh year puzzles, if you want to check out previous years take a look at: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

I believe this is the direct link to the mentioned challenges: https://adventofcode.com/2019

If you want to get started, I would recommend doing Advent of Code 2019 https://adventofcode.com/2019. It goes through and shows how to implement a basic VM. 0x10c / DCPU-16 is also a good place to start. Such simplified CPU-s help you get started and understand the basics without overwhelming you with the complexity :D.

Overall, I think this year felt a lot easier than the last one. Almost no graph problems, no path finding algorithms, and no insane math problems like day 22, 2019. It's really hard finding the right balance. I think 2019 was maybe a bit too hard and discouraged a lot of people. I like that this year was more approachable but perhaps it was a bit too easy towards the end.

Thanks for an amazing year! Definitely a lot easier this year than last one, which was a bit sad. No hard graph problems, requiring path finding algorithms, no insane math problems like day 22 last year. It's hard finding the right balance. I think 2019 was maybe a bit too hard and this year maybe too easy.