See repo: https://github.com/five-hundred-eleven/advent_of_code_2023
Results
I earned 40 out of 50 possible stars, with no stars on days 22 and 25.
My highest ranking was for part 1 of day 11. My ranking was 1315 and my time was 15:43. My part 1 solution was a direct brute force approach.
Another memorable problem was part 2 of day 12, which was a fuzzy regex problem. My solution took me several days to work out. I used a memoized recursive-style (using an arg stack instead of actual recursion) approach.
My Takeaways
- I learned about the shoelace formula for finding the area of a complex polygon.
- Importance of simplicity: For several problems, I tried to implement solutions that snowballed in complexity as I repeatedly added edge cases/optimizations. These types of solutions were extremely difficult to get to work. Putting in the extra planning for a clean, simple solution always paid off.