Hello everyone, long time no see, even though I should have seen it coming. Getting through the most challenging part of the AoC while socialising during a World Cup was destined to fail. And still, I tried and started catching up. Welcome to my Advent of Code 2022 day 15 log.
In today, Thursday really, puzzle. We got a beacon detection puzzle which proved challenging yet entertaining. While the first part came off easy-ish despite a late start, I would not take on the latter part until today.
I needed to head to the office for work that day. As a result, I had less time to complete a puzzle that felt more painful than I imagined. If I recall correctly, I wrapped the first part within thirty minutes. I went for the naive, brute-force implementation from the first part. Unfortunately, this came crashing down as the code hung for a bit. With some print debugging, I realised that the solution would not appear for days if not months. There is no way I wait this long to run code on this computer, electricity prices are rising after all. With all that, my brain fogged up and after another hour, I needed to jump into the shower for a final day in the office.
This became a day full of heavy socialising which while pleasant, prevented me from continuing the second part of the puzzle that day. Heck, even lead to me rising too late to tackle day 16 but fortunately early enough to grab a coffee and get to work. From there things got trickier, a poker night followed, then a friend’s birthday, Christmas shopping and eventually the World Cup final. As you’ve noticed, I didn’t touch AoC since Thursday morning and that was why.
However, just before heading off for my Christmas shopping, I managed to grab the first star from Day 18. I still want to try and see if I can reach the top 1000 in one day. While I reached my best ranking this year clocking at rank 3400 after 34 minutes, it still was not enough but there is always tomorrow. In the meantime, I can still play catch up with the other days.
From there I decided to return to the Day 15 puzzle, I grabbed a pen and paper. I figured that the solution to that second part would appear from drawing shapes. And it did! At this point, I coded away for about an hour and eventually landed a solution which ran in a few seconds. Much better than the months from the previous implementation.
The answer looked way too long to be correct but I wanted to be done so I entered it on the website. It worked, I got the second star for Day 15. Still got to grab those from Days 16, 17 and 18. As my days get shorter I will still try and play catch up. Who knows, it might just work.
Thank you for reading my Advent of Code 2022 Day 15 log, I will see you tomorrow. If you want to check out my previous entry, you can do so here. You can even read my entries from last year there. As usual, I will push the code to my repo for this year on Github. Also, if you want to test yourself against my AoC 2022 run, I’ve created a private leaderboard. The invite code is 382952-d065ee7a . Join, if you dare.
Photo by Los Muertos Crew
