Advent of Code 2024 Day 11 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 11 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/11

[PangHC]

today challenge remind me about 2021 day 6 challenge. It look alike. 

Spoiler

part1: easier to do it in string format. substring is quite annoying to use, i use regex_replace instead. 
  regex_replace([data],"\(d{"+tostring([length]/2)+"})(\d+)","$1|$2")

part2:
tips: group by

[CoG]

Absolutely loved this problem. Part 2 took me a few minutes to realize the trick that changes the problem from being unsolvable to being a walk in the park (Glad I got to use some interface tools this time!):

Spoiler

The trick is to realize that the order of the rocks is irrelevant. This means that you don't need to track each rock. Instead, you can group all rocks with the same number after each blink and track how those two numbers change overtime (which decreases the number of records you need to maintain in memory by many orders of magnitude). I felt a sense of exhilaration and pure delight when that insight clicked in my head. I reconfigured my macro with that insight, and was done very shortly after that!

Main Workflow:


Blink (Iterative Macro):

[gawa]

Need some trick on part2 to finish calculation. 

Spoiler

Part1: Nothing special, just follow instruction.
Part2: If there are 2 or more stones having the same number, they shall be grouped into one and sum up their count, and remember that count. As the stones having the same number will transform in the same way at next blink, no need to evaluate them separately. Repeat 'grouping and summing up count' process until 75 times of blink.
 

[AkimasaKajitani]

Solved!

Today is straightforward, too.

Spoiler

Part 1 macro



Part 2 macro


Part 2 was needed a little minor change.

[Qiu]

Got hint from here. 😁

Spoiler

[peter_gb]

Took me longer than I wish to admit to figure out the trick to part two, and also just let it run in the blind hope it would be fine, knowing that it wouldn't be...

Got there in the end!

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[mark-spain]

Spent 10 minutes iterating with the same macro for Part 2, with my computer sounding like it was going to take off before I worked it out! Ran in 1.5 seconds for part 1 and 2. 

Spoilers ahead:

Spoiler

Part 1 simple iterative macro increasing record count over 25 iterations:
Part 2, added Grouping logic and kept a record of how many times a number exists in the data. This massively reduced processing time as the number of records do not balloon as they do with the first macro. 

[ntakeda]

My workflow is not good...

Spoiler

My Workflow is complicated and not beautiful.
There are many occurrences of numbers 0-9. for 0-9, the results were combined after 5 blinks.
Results other than 0-9 were blinked 5 times.
This was repeated 15 times (5*15).

So my workflow has macro nesting.

   

[DataNath]

Day 11 & another 2 stars down! Despite my defiance in the WhatsApp group, I did indeed end up optimising this in order to save my laptop.

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