Advent of Code 2021 Day 14 (BaseA Style)

[jdunkerley79]

Discussion thread for day 14 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/14

 

[bflick]

My computer definitely hates me for brute forcing part 2.

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Workflow:

Macro:

[NicoleJohnson]

@bflick your computer might hate you, but it's clearly faster than my computer. Brute force might take me until Christmas at this rate...

[clmc9601]

Agreed, @NicoleJohnson! I've realized the hard way that exponentially increasing records process exponentially slower, even in Alteryx. This reminded me suspiciously of trying to brute force one of the previous day's challenges, so I stopped and redesigned my macro instead.

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I realized tokenizing and concatenating billions of characters wasn't my friend for the second part of the challenge. Instead, I realized I could focus on counting the number of letters added per iteration. If I could keep track of the pairs and the resulting combinations, the full string itself didn't actually matter to find the answer.
Workflow

Macro v2Macro v1

[cgoodman3]

@NicoleJohnson I'm currently at iteration 25 and forecast that it will complete in December 2026!

Time to refactor for a solution.

[bflick]

Took some inspiration from @clmc9601  and optimized. Counting letters instead of creating a string.

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Workflow:

Macro

Similar to the lanternfish counted resulting pairs and output the new letters created by each step. 

[afv2688]

It is ugly but it works XD and efficiently!, less than half a second 🙂

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[patrick_digan]

I was happy with how mine turned out, especially my macro.

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I just looked at each pair and counted, similar to others it appears. My macro ended up being really simple. It runs in a second or so.


 

[LiuZhang]

Spoiler

Part 1Part 2workflow

Used a lot of if else statement for part 1, was pride of the macro until hit by part 2.

Picked idea from above when @bflick mentioning about counting letters instead (don't really understand @clmc9601 's workflow), but got there eventually.

[dsmdavid]

Also tried to brute force part 2 for a while, then opted for some counting too. Keen to see how other people "counted".

Spoiler

and the iterative:

https://github.com/dsmdavid/AdventCode2021