Advent of Code 2021 Day 12 (BaseA Style)

[jdunkerley79]

Discussion thread for day 12 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/12

 

[bflick]

A real pathfinding mission. Reminder that regex functions have to be specified as case sensitive! Hopefully saves you a little time. Iterative macros for the win yet again.

Spoiler

An interesting twist on building out hierarchy trees. My main challenges were dealing with duplicates and building it all dynamically without field names.
Main Workflow:

Challenge 1 Macro:

Challenge 2 Macro

[clmc9601]

Thankful for dynamic rename and dynamic select!

Spoiler

I used an iterative macro to add segments to the chain and evaluate whether the current path obeyed the small-cave-once criteria and/or was finished on the current iteration. I made a slight adjustment to the filter logic for the second challenge.

[patrick_digan]

Happy with my solution today. Although part 2 took slightly longer as I didn't realize only 1 small cave could be visited twice (I was letting them all be visited twice).

Spoiler

Workflow:

Macro for part 2. Similar to part 1 with only minor changes to let 1 small cave be visited twice:

[AkimasaKajitani]

Today is iterative day.

Spoiler

The difference from macro 1 and macro 2 is only the filtering way and adding parameter.

Macro for star1

Macro for star2

GitHub

https://github.com/AkimasaKajitani/AdventOfCode/tree/main/2021

[cgoodman3]

Spoiler

This is a challenge which highlights how it is tricky being able to debug iterative macros, as the example inputs don't end up duplicating small caves on the first iteration so needed a bit of blind building of the conditional part of the macro.
In addition I found that I needed to cap the number of iterations at 3 more than part 1 solve to get the answer as I had some logic which was causing it to cycle back and forth (i.e. iteration - 1 would filter out repeating caves, but then it would keep adding on the pairing and it would need removing again), so I didn't have a suitable exit condition.

Macro for part 1

Macro for part 2
Slight modification to deal with the allowing a visiting one small cave once.

[SeanAdams]

This took MUCH longer than it should have - the thing that tripped me up was allowing 1 double visit to a small cave rather than a blanket rule for all caves.

Really enjoyed the fact that I got to use the Arrange tool for this one.

Spoiler

Recipe:
- Set up a list of unique caves; and unique paths
- Starting with the start node repeat the following:
      - Join to all the possible nodes based on the paths available
      - Remove any that go through start or end-nodes more than once
      - remove any that go through small caves more than once
      - add back anything where you only double-visit a specific small cave once

The loop piece:

[Pang_Hee_Choy]

Spoiler

it take longer than usual.

i change lot of macro input and retry again and again.
keep find wrong answer, like do not check the small character.
in part 2, forget to check small character more than 2. etc...

Workflow:

for input, split start point and other. (which include end point) 
transpose them, and keep the original relation. (to get the opposite link later.)

*put ID for easier reference later.Macro

Join first to get all the possible entry.
verify the new chain, whether is small and count is 1.
verify whether is "-end"

Part2:
verify again the count >2 whether are only have 1 small link appear twice.

[caitlynmcintyre]

I liked this one a lot(:

Spoiler

Inside the Macro:

Part 1 just used diff logic for continuing the loop