I liked this one - took a little time to carve out a spot to work on it, but it was enjoyable (a little geometric thinking)
Spoiler
Approach:
create a rowID; a column ID; a diagnal 1 & 2 ID (for the two diagonal directions). this way you can group them into strings
- To create the diags - it's worth knowing that on the one diag, x+y =c; and on the other x-y = c
Then you just take these groups and look for the relevant strings
For part 2 - if you know which letter in the string is the A, you can do a simple join to find X shapes - and then just count.
Python solution to follow.
Code is stored here: SeanAdams10/AdventOfCodePython: Advent of code challenges in Python - across multiple years
create a rowID; a column ID; a diagnal 1 & 2 ID (for the two diagonal directions). this way you can group them into strings
- To create the diags - it's worth knowing that on the one diag, x+y =c; and on the other x-y = c
Then you just take these groups and look for the relevant strings
For part 2 - if you know which letter in the string is the A, you can do a simple join to find X shapes - and then just count.
Python solution to follow.
Code is stored here: SeanAdams10/AdventOfCodePython: Advent of code challenges in Python - across multiple years
Took me way too long to realize I was counting diagonals in only one direction 😅
Spoiler
Record ID and Tile can be used to get the coordinates for each letter, simple formula to group letters into diagonals. Concatenate base on each coordinate to get all possible strings and parse for results.
For part 2, parse each set of diagonals for MAS/SAM then join based on coordinates to find overlaps.
For part 2, parse each set of diagonals for MAS/SAM then join based on coordinates to find overlaps.
