Advent of Code 2023

See Advent of Code for details.

It reminds me of the Lego advent calendar where each model is a tiny investment in time to build it. I look at Advent of Code as a similar low-investment opportunity to practice some coding on puzzles that can be interesting without having tons of gotchas.

Why Ruby?

I'm doing them in Ruby because while I'm not an expert, I know it well enough and I could use some more practice.

I'm more knowledgeable in Java, but it takes more work to get anything done in Java. I feel my knowledge of Python is not quite strong enough; I would spend even more time looking things in the language. I could have tried JavaScript, but I feel Ruby is a little better at parsing text than JS.

I could have tried Groovy, but it's been a while since I've coded in Groovy and it has been losing popularity lately. I feel that's unfortunate.

Why Are There No Tests?!?

I just tinker on these late in the evening. For these, I care more about coming up with a solution that I find elegant than adhering to strict engineering discipline. I try to keep the code "simple", so each solution is a single script that operates on an input text files and writes to stdout.

Stats

Day		Part 1 Rank	Part 1 Total	Part 1 Percentile		Part 2 Rank	Part 2 Total	Part 2 Percentile
18		31968	32140	0			26992	0
16		5101	39165	86		5977	38020	84
15		7039	48431	85		6049	43742	86
14		6186	47196	86		6018	39098	84
13		7779	46489	83		9029	40847	77
12		5123	48817	89		5574	33566	83
11		6277	63843	90		6548	61193	89
10		9273	70024	86		5685	51606	88
9		10693	83135	87		10290	81640	87
8		9644	94951	89		10514	78920	86
7		13683	95295	85		11794	87189	86
6		17724	112385	84		17369	110137	84
5		12749	119180	89		11895	85543	86
4		16043	159127	89		16723	139517	88
3		12883	162796	92		13028	140354	90
2		86360	224723	61		91148	213679	57
1		149845	339153	55		108713	252464	56

As of 2024-12-20 10:10:00 PST.