I was a bit quiet these past few days, because I was busy with the final stages of #AdventOfCode: Final result: I managed to get all but 4 puzzles (day 17, day 24 part 2, day 25) to run on DOS. 🥳 There’s a chance that the missing ones might be portable as well, but I need a break now. 😅 🎄 Merry Christmas. 🎄

I’m really bad at competitive programming. 🙄 For today’s #AdventOfCode puzzle, I spent an eternity trying to understand exactly what kind of bG9naWMgY2lyY3VpdAo= the puzzle input describes – I haven’t done that in well over a decade, so I made little progress. I knew right from the start that SSBoYWQgdG8gbG9vayBmb3IgY3ljbGUgbGVuZ3RocyBhbmQgdGhlbiBmaW5kIHRoZSBMQ00K. It just didn’t occur to me to just run my program on cGFydGlhbCBpbnB1dAo= and print those numbers. 🥴 I only did that after over 4 hours (including time to debug my nasty C code) and then, boom, solution …

One thing to note about #AdventOfCode: It is really, really important to inspect your input data. Your data could be considered part of the puzzle description. By inspecting it, you can find clues and you might find out that you can make certain assumptions. (I mean, what’s the alternative? There could be a list of allowed assumptions in the textual descriptions, right? That wouldn’t be a lot of fun, I think, as it would give away too much information about the solution. It’s more interesting to find those clues yourself.)

Another great #AdventOfCode puzzle today: Not that hard on modern CPUs but a challenge for DOS. That’s the interesting stuff I was hoping for!

I have been really impressed with the cool visualizations in pygame that @gereleth over on Twitter has been making. #AdventOfCode

I have been really impressed with the cool visualizations in pygame that @gereleth over on Twitter has been making. #AdventOfCode

(#irslaoq) @movq Yeah you are right! 🤗 Thank you for re-motivating me 🙇‍♂️ However I am a day behind now, but I will catch up 🤞 My goal started out completing this year's #AdventOfCode writing all solutions in Go and mostly using functional style programming 😁

So today's #adventofcode was solved with no programming. Just a bit o maths and wolfram/alpha

So today's #adventofcode was solved with no programming. Just a bit o maths and wolfram/alpha

Today's #AdventofCode #2023 was a bit of a whoozie 🤣 Not only did I have to work today (_today being Monday et all_), but also had to deal with a minor incident, then have dinner, etc and by the time I got back to my half-finished day 4 puzzle, I got a bit stuck with the 2nd part 🤦‍♂️ I guess I don't really like array manipulation, it's so easy to get lost 🤣