Advent of Code 2023 Day 4 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 4 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/4

[JarrodT]

I accidentally mislabeled my batch macro, so had the opportunity to use "Find Missing Macros" function, which worked beautifully. I went the route of a batch macro with a nested iterative macro - not sure both were needed, but it gets the job done. 

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[NicoleJ]

Another fun one! AND it's macro time... I do love a good iterative macro in the morning!!

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Part 1 was pretty straightforward solve, used my new GetPart formulas for the initial parsing into cards > my hand > winning hand, and then fun to find an excuse to use the POW function (ka-POW!!!!)

Part 2 ended up being simpler than expected once I paused and made sure to annotate a few things and understand my steps first before launching into my iterative macro. I love a good iterative macro use case, and this was a perfect one!!

 

[mmontgomery]

Day4. I Macro is brute force to solve it 'faster'

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[patrick_digan]

Similar non-macro as @Pang_Hee_Choy . I'm forever grateful to @danilang who showed me the power of the multi-row formula tool for the AOC challenges many years ago. 

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[Kenda]

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attempted to go the non-macro route at first then threw that idea out the window

[DavidP]

Not my best work, but it's done! Iterative macro took 13 minutes to run, but I don't care!!!

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[Carolyn]

Oof - I predict I'll be good at Iterative Macros by the time the challenge is finished. Thanks to @phottovy for posting your solution file. After my attempts failed miserably, yours was super helpful! We'll see how it goes next Iterative Macro challenge, but I feel like I understand them way better than I did 2.5 hours ago :) 

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[afv2688]

This one took a while to think how to do it with no macro :)

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[FrederikE]

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[mceleavey]

Ok, so my iterative macro was being extremely naughty, and so I set it on fire and used a macro-free brute force approach.

Don't judge me.

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The first part was really easy. I simply stripped out the component parts, split to rows so I had a winning number per row and filtered to where one of my numbers was the same as a winner. I then simply multi-rowed a double calculation per card and boom.
Part two was a bit frustrating as I probably messed up something very straightforward with my iterative macro. The initial design simply ran through for each card number and generated the rows for each one, I then stripped out the originals and unioned the output back to the initial stream but it kept giving me extra rows and I couldn't figure out why, so I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation and brute forced it with an inelegant multi-row, using a look back for the number of rows representing the possible number of wins (10):
(if [Row-10:Count]-10>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) * [Row-10:Wins] +
(if [Row-9:Count]-9>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-9:Wins] +
(if [Row-8:Count]-8>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-8:Wins] +
(if [Row-7:Count]-7>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-7:Wins] +
(if [Row-6:Count]-6>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-6:Wins] +
(if [Row-5:Count]-5>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-5:Wins] +
(if [Row-4:Count]-4>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-4:Wins] +
(if [Row-3:Count]-3>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-3:Wins] +
(if [Row-2:Count]-2>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-2:Wins] +
(if [Row-1:Count]-1>=0 then 1 else 0 endif) *[Row-1:Wins] + 1

...which made my brain hurt so I need to lie down.

Still irritated as to why my iterative didn't work...

M.