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

[LHolmes]

Crazy Numbers - made me think of the Franck Muller Crazy Numbers timepieces - paid as tribute in the macro icon.

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2024 Day 11 Part 1 & 22024 Day 11 Iterative Macro

[niklas_greilinger]

Fun challenge :) Tried to run part 2 without grouping at first but it almost killed my laptop :D 

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[geoff_zath]

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[Carolyn]

Solved!

I knew there was a trick in Pt 2 but I had to look at @CoG 's for the hint/answer - thank you!

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My Pt 1 macro carefully keeps track of the order. I figured that Pt 2 would ask for the middle rock or something - nope For the Pt 2 macro, I removed all the RecordID stuff in addition to adding the Group By. I could also use this to replace the Pt 1 macro, but it was already built so I left it :)

Pt 1: 

Pt 2: 

[Tokimatsu]

I just looked and found a misspelling of the field name.

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[Shifty]

11!

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[kelsey_kincaid]

I knew brute force was going to burn me in Part 2, and I was right. This reminded me of the lanternfish from a couple of years ago, but it took me awhile to remember how I solved that one and apply it here.

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I spent a lot of time in spreadsheets trying to figure out an equation that could project out how many rocks we'd have after 75 iterations. After taking a couple of weeks away from this one, I came back fresh and realized that grouping is key!

[estherb47]

Having a very strange experience with 3 separate challenges correct on first answer for each parts 1 & 2

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Weird though. Initially I had a single formula tool to figure things out, all text based (and all enough space for said text), with a touch of text to columns. For whatever reason, this worked with the first part, but not with summarizing on the second.

Once I switched to processing as integers, part 2 worked. So guessing something was wonky with multiplying by 2024.

Anyways, flow is attached.