Advent of Code 2021 Day 6 (BaseA Style)

[jdunkerley79]

Discussion thread for day 6 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/6

[caitlynmcintyre]

Oooooh this was a doozy. At first I thought it was so easy but Part 2 just wouldn't work because I was trying to calculate as rows...  I got to 170 days and 14 hours of running before giving up
then I tried with a single string and find&replace but ran up against the 2gb limit and eventually got to this

Spoiler

Macro:

[Mchappell67]

Like everybody else, realized that the simple, brute force method was not going to work for part 2, so had to rewrite to group the days and handle mathematically.  Took entirely too long as I struggled with the addition of the 0's to the 6's.  Would really like the ability to create read-write variables.  Anyhow, here's my solution.

Spoiler

[Mchappell67]

Hi, @caitlynmcintyre -

Wow - you are patient!  14 hours!!  I gave up after about 15 minutes and pretty much arrived at the same result as you (and, presumably, everybody else).

Mark