Advent of Code 2023 Day 8 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 8 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/8

[SuguruYoshinaga]

Spoiler

[caitlynmcintyre]

ooops posted Day 9 in Day 8 (haven't solved part 2 yet)

edit: so I gave in and caved to the LCM calc as well. I really didn't pay attention to this part until i'd wasted days  "If only some of the nodes you're on end with Z, they act like any other node and you continue as normal."

and was convinced I could calculate row by row

Spoiler

 

[lwolfie]

I definitely took some notes to get this one done.  I was proud of getting Part 1 on my own but needed helps on part 2.  Finally got there!

[estherb47]

Had to fight through a ton of brain fog due to illness to get through this one. From the beginning, my processes were correct and I had really tiny errors throughout, which were ultimately cleared up by re-reading the challenge approximately 3 million times.

Because it was taking me so much time, I was able to optimize for speed and play with about 65 billion different versions of my macros. The attached workflow takes 1 minute to run with AMP enabled. 

Moral of the story: Take great caution when Alteryxing when you haven't been able to eat or drink sufficiently.

Spoiler

First error. It starts with "AAA"

Fun discovery. Each ends with A path can only go to one ends with Z path. Hard coding the Z paths caused infinite loops.

Fun fact: I was known for creating infinite loops in my high school programming class (Pascal. Yes, I'm ancient). Even my teachers couldn't debug what I had done.

The last issue was that my macro that figured out the steps failed to include the final step of getting to Z. Easily fixed with a formula tool 

[DaisukeTsuchiya]

I post again with solution in yxzp.

Spoiler

[Shelbey]

Started off Part 1 thinking it was going to be breeze... and it would have been if I would have built my macro without any errors. After spending an embarassing amount of time on my macro and it still not working, I decided to take the second example and manually run each iteration of my macro by changing my inputs to the outputs I created and increasing my iteration number manually. It only took my three iterations to find my error -- my formula needed a = instead of a > 😐 

Now that it's already December 22 and I'm not even halfway through, and since everyone already posted how difficult Part 2 is, I'm going to go ahead and stop right here and move on to Day 9.

Spoiler

Workflow:

Macro:

[Tokimatsu]

Done

Spoiler