That's a lot of lantern fish, making for a very bright ocean.
Non-macro (here you go, @bflick) solution running in 0.3 sec for the 256 days. I have many happy!!
Didn't win Tool Golf, @NicoleJohnson, but I might just have the fastest solution
Uses a multi-row tool that looks back up to 17 rows with special conditions to calculate the current count of 8 and 6 fish.
Dan
Went the iterative route, and like many others, realized that generating numbers was way too slow.
Anyone else frustrated in removing the commas when you generate a number with Alteryx?
I finally had to bite on the macro bait. I think @NicoleJohnson is right that there is a mathematical solve with factorials and modulus functions but I didn't get there. Then I tried generating rows, that didn't work past 30 days. My first macro left it in rows and does the 80 days fine but slowed way down about 135 iterations in. After all that, I figured it out the same way most of the others did.
Cheers, Michael
Different version of macro-less
https://github.com/dsmdavid/AdventCode2021
Edited for Golf points:
Really went nowhere with this one, have to look what others did. @NicoleJohnson's '6,8' split give me the idea to do part 1, then part 2 went nowhere again with the speed, another idea on the summarize helped on the part 2. Learnt a lot about AMP engine for the wrong reason 😂
Like most others, iterative macro FTW.
While it runs in less than 1 minute at ~44s, I am curious if anyone comes up with a faster solution without an iterative macro - definitely seemed the path of least resistance to me.
Like many of you - I iterated using a macro - but used a Batch Macro instead just to buck the trend. I find that batch macros pretending to be iterative macros are MUCH easier to debug. I want to go back and look at some of the formulaic solutions now 🙂
You'll see that I pump the fish data out to a file
Challenge accepted @joshbennett
.3 seconds non-macro. See my post above. @afv2688 is measuring in European time. That's why his solution is .1 second faster than mine.
Dan