Advent of Code 2023 Day 4 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 4 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/4

[clmc9601]

There has to be a way to do part 2 without a macro... but since I was racing instead of pondering, I built a macro

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Fairly simple workflow

simple iterative macroworkflow

[CoG]

@clmc9601

Same! Although your solution is much more elegant than mine.

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Macro:

Main Workflow:

[gawa]

@CoG @clmc9601 

Similar to yours!

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[phottovy]

I went the macro route as well.

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[JeffF]

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Macro


Workflow

[Tokimatsu]

 My 1st macro on AoC 2023.

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[Yoshiro_Fujimori]

Not a fancy workflow at all, but al least it worked😅.

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Workflow (Main)

Workflow (Macro)

[DaisukeTsuchiya]

I spent the time to understand and create logic for part2.

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WF

 

Macro

 

 

[kelsey_kincaid]

This one was frustrating, because I had the right idea from the beginning but made a lot of mistakes along the way. I'll let this serve as my annual reminder that generating a lot of rows is often not the best approach, especially with Advent of Code!

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Part 1: Found the points for each card by taking the 2^(num_matches - 1)

Part 2: This was a journey. I started by spinning my wheels on an iterative macro that worked on the sample data AFTER I corrected a lot of silly mistakes. I wish I could recall what those were now, but a lot of time has passed since then 😅

Once I got my macro working on the sample data, I tried the production data. I quickly realized that my approach was flawed, because the iterations were taking a long time to process. My initial approach was to use Generate Rows to create a brand new card for each copy won. I realized that I didn't actually need to create a copy of the card - I just needed to know how many would be generated. This led me to my final solution, which was to process each card individually and determine how many of the other cards it would generate (I'm confusing myself even explaining it). 

I agree with @clmc9601 that there HAS to be a way to do it without a macro, but I might leave that pondering until tomorrow.

Main Workflow: 


Macro:

First Macro Using Generate Rows: This was going to take forever to run. Very brute force approach in hindsight.