Advent of Code 2023 Day 5 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 5 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/5

[JeffF]

Brute force.

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[starkey]

@gawa Nice work on this! By far the most elegant solution I've seen for this challenge.

[alisonpitt]

My heart leapt out of my chest when I ran my first try of part 2 without looking how big the numbers were 😱 But handling the ranges of numbers ended up being a really interesting exercise. I feel like I probably could have used a macro for this, but with the number of steps, I went with brute-force.

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[Qiu]

At first I believed brutal force and finally getting the result as below. It was an epic failure.
Then moved to the Range comparing approach, with some hints from here, I got the answer and I decided to move on even I can not explain the logic in my flow.

Interesting thing is that I am still getting the incorrect answer when I use my input with the most of workflows uploaded here. 😁
So I guess its just something we can forget and leave behind and continue our life, continue to be tortured by Day 7 or Day xx. 😅 (Day 6, you are nice), continue to hope to retire to beach one day. @mceleavey  

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[kelsey_kincaid]

I was on the cusp of solving this one for... many many hours. @PangHC 's workflow looked most similar to my approach, so I ended up having to open that up to help me troubleshoot why I was getting the right answer on the sample data but not my prod data. It was super helpful - even though I was getting the right answer on the sample data, my approach was wrong,  and Pang_Hee_Choy's mapping table helped me identify those issues. Thank you for your work!

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Part 1: I started with my favorite - a brute force generate rows approach. Shame on me for not first looking at my prod data! I had to re-tool to evaluate ranges instead. I did that by building an iterative macro that loops through each mapping table to find the matches.

Part 2: Beat my head against a wall for a long time on this. I didn't read the problem closely enough and wasn't subtracting 1 from the range in a number of calculations. I also had to tweak the way I was handling matches within partial ranges. Since locations without any mapping to previous values was my final output, I had a hard time tracing my work for troubleshooting. Lesson learned there too I think. I may need another night of sleep before I can fully explain how this works. 

Workflow:

Part 1 Macro:


Part 2 Macro:

[StevenP]

While going the route of brute force may have gotten me to the answer faster I refused to give in and kept banging my head to get this to run efficiently. Ultimately I succeeded and got my overall run time down to 1.1 seconds.

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For Part 2 I reverse-engineered the location back into the seed based on the given ranges:

[SuguruYoshinaga]

Part 2 was very difficult.

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WF

Macro for part 1

Macro for part 2

[leonhekkert]

Actually quite proud that I got the solution to part 2! Did have to start all over though as my approach to part 1 was the brute force kind. 

Part two is done with a batch and iterative macro and takes less then 2 seconds!

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[lwolfie]

I ran into the same trap as everyone.  My is definitely Ugly and I went the range route.

[Laurap1228]

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I built two Macros for this one.