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Advent of Code 2024 Day 15 (BaseA Style)

AlteryxCommunityTeam

Discussion thread for day 15 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/15

Advent of Code

Accepted answers

All comments

Gawa

I'm happy to use Alteryx even in the weekend.

Spoiler

Part1: Applied Regex_Replace to create new location of objects.

REGEX_Replace([Concat_Object], "(^.*#[^#]*?)(\.?)(O*@)$", "$1$3$2")&#8203;

Part2: Starting from "@, trace the objects until reaching to #". I had to use nested Iterative Macro, and logic was complicate when moving upward or downward.
To be honest, I admit my WFs still have much room of improvements. It takes too long time execution (30 min).

(EDIT)

Optimized my WF for Part2: 7minutes. I could not make it faster any more.

2024D15_gawa.yxzp

2024D15_gawa_rev1.yxzp

ntakeda

My solution.

It takes about 7min.

Spoiler

Parts 1 and 2 are almost the same.
In part 2, I added a few more conditions.

AoC2024-part15_1.yxzp

AoC2024-part15_2.yxzp

Tokimatsu

In P1 I focused on the map and in P2 I focused on the object.

AoC2024_Day15.yxzp

mmontgomery

Day15. More in spoiler

Spoiler

P1: Macro to build out each path: up, down, left, and right while checking to see if multiple can be moved at once
P2: It took a long time to figure out an approach. I knew I needed some dynamic logic to connect the vertical moving blocks that weren't aligned. My nested macro looks at the current point, next point, and next corresponding point (for instance if the next point was '[' the corresponding point would be ']' and then assigns the proper column. Then I'd loop through each combo until I hit a '#'. The results of this macro gave me all the data points affected by a vertical move. This allowed the block to move as one step and determine if they'd hit a '.' or a '#'. Left/right/up/down with no blocks impacted were the same from P1

17 min run time before I could optimize.

Day 15_MM.yxzp

Hub119

This one was a bit of a beast... happy to have managed to get almost all of it done while riding shotgun for two long car rides yesterday as well... and special shoutout to my fiancé for driving and letting me work on Advent of Code.

Part 1 I approached essentially the exact same way I did Day 6 part 1 (for one time through at least with that guard it ran fairly quickly so thought I would try that route again). Part 2 (once the new grid was prepped) I handled two different ways. For horizontal movement I treated it the same way as part 1, for vertical movement I decided to focus in on the objects in the path and used an additional nested iterative macro to do the checks for surrounding "big box" pieces and walls they might run into.

Spoiler

Main Workflow

Spoiler

P1 Macro

Spoiler

P2 Main Macro

Spoiler

P2 Check Macro

AoC 2024 Day 15.yxzp

CoG

This took way longer than I hoped it would. I kept constantly crashing into bugs that were often trivial to fix, but difficult to find. I built a mechanism to capture all states of the map, and generated a video file to watch the robot on its route in the sample data to make sure nothing weird was happening... But that's all behind me now. No fancy algorithms, just good old fashioned brute force (with limited optimizations as well):

Spoiler

Move Robot Macro:
Move Robot.png

Helper macro to identify all vertically connected boxes that need to move as unit:

Main2.yxzp

AkimasaKajitani

Finally, solved!

This is the one of the most difficult puzzle this year for me.

Spoiler

This workflow is definitely not a reference, it's like a patchwork effort as I couldn't find a good algorithm.

Part 1:
This is simple workflow.

Part 2:
Part 2 macro is too many tool and very complex workflow. Definitely the most complex workflow of the year. Horizontal direction algorithm is the same as part 1. But vertical direction is very messy.

The vertical algorithm consists of three parts. The first is an algorithm that extracts all objects in the direction of pushing the luggage from the starting point(@). The second identifies the luggage to be pushed. The third determines whether pushing will result in a collision with a wall.
Parts 1 and 2 are macros.

#1(Search object macro)

This macro extract the data as follows(blue box).

#2(Identify the luggage to push)

In the past, I missed the situation below. So, I create this macro. This macro is to solve that situation.

My first algorythm is not considered about orange blocks becase the X-axis push process was only performed once. I am using a iterative macro to group blocks repeatedly.

Day15.yxzp

AncientPandaman

it difficult to find where the bug. it worked in sample but not the input.

Spoiler

part1: just follow the instructions

part2: just change on ^v, (<> is same rules as above)

use nested macro to check if [ or ] then add one right/left cells.
check until any of it blocks (or escape when all meet empty space)

i faced bugs below:
1. when have hole in middle, it ignore the middle space
[][].
[].[]
[][].
.[]..
..@..

2. when have hole in side, it ignore the space
[][
[].
[][
.[]

Day 15.yxzp

DaisukeTsuchiya

Day15P2 was one of the most challenging problems to solve in this year’s AoC.

Spoiler

In P1, there were 20,000 loops, and initially, history was maitained, which caused errors in Alteryx. The box positions were swapped using regular expressions, but the processing in P1 was somewhat redundant.

For P2, I gave up reusing P1 and decided to rebuild it from scratch. After considerable thought, I referred to @Tokimatsu 's workflow for inspiration. By representing only the left side of "O" and "#" as representative points without actually increasing the "O" and "#", significant simplification was achieved.

First, a mapping table was created in Excel by drawing a diagram of which range of cells would be affected when "@ or O" moved. When "@ moved, the influence range of the pushed cells were calculated. If there was a #" within the range, the move was canceled; if there was no "#", a macro updated the positions of "@ and O".

P1 took about 10 minutes to execute, and P2 took about 8 minutes.

スクリーンショット 2024-12-29 115722.png
<P1 Macro>
スクリーンショット 2024-12-29 115747.png
<P2 Macro to check the pushed cell>
スクリーンショット 2024-12-29 115809.png
<P2 Main Macro>
スクリーンショット 2024-12-29 115852.png スクリーンショット 2024-12-29 115653.png

DT2024_Day15_Rev2.yxzp

ccanterman

Solved!

I was able to get a working solution for Part 1, but it took ~3 hours to run. While it was running, I looked through the posts here and saw @gawa's RegEx witchcraft and redid my Part 1 macro with his technique. I initially tried to just do one Generate Rows regardless of the direction, which worked, but then in the next step, I ended up with double the tools, compared to Gawa. I did the 2nd Generate Rows which then made everything else downstream much simpler.

For Part 2, I initially tried to do it by naming the boxes 1 and 2 instead of [ and ], to try to still be able to use some of Gawa's fancy RegEx - it worked for the small example but not for the larger example. I also tried to just have a value for the left side of the box and blank for the right side, but that turned into a mess. Eventually, I went back to a version of what I did for my 3 hour part 1, with a lot of support from Gawa's part 2 when I kept getting stuck (THANK YOU!) and finally got something that works. It takes 3.5 hours to run, but, hey, I'm calling it a victory

I also misread part 2 and thought it was saying the GPS was from where ever the nearest corner of the building was, vs the newest corner of the box but always from the top left. So I initially added in more logic than needed and was very confused

Spoiler

Part 1: Works but takes 3 hours

Part 1: Gawa's RegEx method.... so much cleaner and faster. Took ~10 minutes

Part 2 - took 3.5 hours, but it works

Day 15.yxzp

estherb47

Part 1 completed. This was a very different challenge than I've done before (and this is my most successful year to date as far as feeling good with my solutions.

Haven't tackled part 2 yet.

Spoiler

Iterative macro for the win. Brought in the row with the @ symbol, and then all cells in the up, right, left, or down position, based on direction.

Summarized them up, and then used RegEx_Replace to shift the positions if needed.

What was weird was that my usual approach of sending a long string through the iteration, rather than many short strings, took a significantly long period of time. Minutes for each individual iteration. Refactored to a long list, one cell per line, which went rapidly.

Kept joined fields to a minimum by using generate rows for the neighboring cells.

Also, AMP on made for a much slower process. 20 minutes with AMP, 4 minutes without.

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