@jason@jasonsanta.xyz If you can describe the problem, maybe I can help.

@prologic I can try to explain, if you want to know. 😅 Or maybe this guy’s visualization will help (if you can see it, not sure): https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/18af47j/2023_day_4_scratchcard_counting/

A couple centimeters of snow today. 😊 And I’ve got a loooooooong vacation coming up. Time to relax. 😃

This is my favorite time of the year – by far. Even if it means the snow will freeze in my beard. 😂

@prologic (Mild spoilers ahead.)

Today’s puzzle was one of those where I immediately knew that there must be a solution that does not require actually copying anything. AoC often has these kinds of problems that make it look like you have to create lots of duplicates, multiply objects, stuff like that. That’s often a sign that you can solve it by doing something simple. 😅 (If only that was true in real life as well. 😂)

A little “visualization” / “progress bar” of day 3 part 2:

https://movq.de/v/6fc13f8ce1/MVI_6766.MOV.mp4

Running in a DOS box under OS/2 Warp 4, including some of OS/2’s silly sound effects. 🤣

@prologic Yours is more clever and cleaner, I think. 🤔 You were able to reuse more code for the second part. I, instead, wrote a different search logic for part 2. 😅

@prologic

Did I write too much code again? 😅

I don’t know. 😅 My solution is rather long as well:

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/advent-of-code/file/2023/day03/s.c.html

Still happily runs on DOS.

@prologic Oof, it’s already getting a bit tricky. 😬

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org All I can say is: My client didn’t report any errors. :-) (Does that mean anything? 😅)

@xuu@txt.sour.is Ah, you went with the “scanning” approach as well. I did that, too.

It’s quite surprising to see (imho) how many people on reddit started substituting strings (one becomes 1 etc.). That makes the puzzle much harder by introducing nasty corner cases.

(Maybe I was just lucky this time to pick the correct approach right from the start. 🤣 Or maybe it’s a bit of experience from doing past AoC events …)

Here’s some more #AdventOfCode nostalgia:

https://movq.de/v/6441f2fe2a/MVI_6760.MOV.mp4

It shows the machine’s boot sequence and the copy process: I somehow have to grab the files from my normal PC and I do that using FTP under Windows 3.11, there’s a PCI Ethernet card in that machine. Then some glorious WinZip action to decompress the files. 😃 Finally the first two AoC 2023 puzzles are being run.

(Yes, there’s a GRUB on that machine. 🥴 It’s a left-over from some experiments with Linux ages ago and I didn’t bother to uninstall it.)

@prologic That is a lot of code, yes. 😅 Mine is shorter, has more naive searching (it searches a word like red and then backtracks to the number before it; completely ignoring the semi-colons because they don’t matter), and – like any good C program – will crash horribly on malformed input. 👌😂🥴

https://www.uninformativ.de/git/advent-of-code/file/2023/day02/s.c.html

It really depends on what you’re after. I’d never write code like this in “real-world applications”. But for these puzzles and my DOS use case, it’s “good enough”. 😅

My immediate reaction to today’s puzzle was: “Ahhh, shit.” 😂 Parsing these input files in C is not a lot of fun. 🥴

@prologic It sure does! 😊 (Was the video big/large enough? I should probably capture in a higher resolution next time. 🤔)

@prologic The solutions will go here:

git clone https://uninformativ.de/git/advent-of-code.git

About demos … I made a video yesterday, but I’m not sure if it’s that interesting. 😅

https://movq.de/v/de32f1481f/MVI_6756.MOV.mp4

I’d probably have to do some cool visualizations for the more interesting puzzles. 🤔 Not sure if I can pull that off, though. 😅 It’s probably going to be hard enough anyway. (I wonder how long I can get away with just conventional memory, i.e. only ~500 kB.) We’ll see.

@prologic Ah, right, kids and school. Yeah, oof, nothing you can do about that. 😐

@prologic It’s the perfect time of day for Aussies, isn’t it? People in the EU would have to get up around 6am. 🤣 I just happened to be awake anyway today.

@prologic I joined as movq42rax. Don’t expect speedy results from me, because porting my solutions to DOS is my personal goal this year, intended to be runnable on that old Pentium. 😅

@prologic Argh! 🤢 I wish you guys a speedy recovery. (Any idea where you got it?)

@eapl.me@eapl.me Great timing. 😅

Yeah, it can be quite exhausting to do one puzzle per day. I guess taking some vacation is mandatory. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Now that’s what I’d call winter. 😊 Awesome to look at. Poor camera, though. 😮

@eapl.me@eapl.me Whaaaaaaaat, you’re doing a programming challenge at this time of the year and it ISN’T Advent of Code?! 😱 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh lovely, look at all that snow. 😍 Good luck to the restaurant guys.

@prologic I walked. 😅 I mean, I walk rather fast and it’s not a relaxed stroll, but it certainly isn’t running. 😅 The goal isn’t to lose weight but to be outdoors, enjoy nature, and clear my mind.

Just to be clear, it was 100km over the course of a whole month. It was 23 tracks with 4.4km per track on average (4.4km is roughly 50 minutes). It’s actually not that much, it’s mostly time consuming. 😂

Made it to 100km today. 🥳 (It was harder than it should have been, because I was basically knocked out for about a week. 🤣)