adventofcode VS aoc2015

Ah, okay. I added a small optimization to my solution to part 2; it now completes in a little over a second (on my machine) for your input as well.

That's what I did - I designed a tree based on a simple node class:

Python 3.

Python 3: part 1, part 2.

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.