How did so many get the first star within the first 3 mins?

(#irslaoq) @xuu I ask myself that question every year. 🤣 To be fair, the first part wasn’t really that difficult. If you have *A LOT* of experience with these kind of problems/puzzles and if you have a proper framework, I imagine it’s doable. (I, on the other hand, spent about 40 minutes just writing my C code to parse the input.) Some of these people record themselves and then post it on YouTube. It’s pretty crazy to watch. 🥴 The second part of the puzzle, was/is pretty hard, though. At least for me, because I haven’t found “the trick” yet. I’m currently trying to brute-force it while having breakfast. 😅 (But given that it took ~8 minutes for the first person to get both stars, maybe they brute-forced it as well. With a faster machine and multithreading, ~8 minutes sounds about right. Brute-force is rarely the answer in AoC, though.)

(#irslaoq) … it just finished and brute-force worked. 18 minutes of computing time on my 11 year old machine, single-threaded.

(#irslaoq) Oh man I haven't even started coding yet 🤦‍♂️ This is fast becoming no fun 😢

(#irslaoq) @prologic Doing AoC competitively is super hard. I don’t enjoy this at all. I just *happened* to be quick these first few days. 😅 I rather set my own goals. Like the DOS thing this year. That is a lot of fun. 😊 (I just have to remember not to check the leaderboards. 🤣)

(#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 😁

(#irslaoq) @prologic day 6 is super easy if you have int64 and some binomial theory. Skip ahead for the easy stars and catch up!