Advent of Code 2024 Day 9 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 9 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/9

[PangHC]

first?

Spoiler

part1: 
split to the step accordingly then create a freeID in ascend and fileID in descend. verified if the positionID will be smaller.

part2:
use data given before split to the line. (keep the data size, to easier to compare later)
check one by one from bottom, if size is enough, position is earlier.
generate another rows if free size is larger.

loop for 10k iteration, and take 40 mins to run it

[CoG]

There are many optimizations that can be made here to shorten time needed for Part 2 (I have only used a few, but have a V2 that I'm working on). Current workflow runs in ~20 minutes:

Spoiler

A lot of joins and data manipulation, but fairly straight forward. The optimization I used here (for part 2) is to exclude records that are on the right and no longer being considered or so far to the left that no free space exists to move anything else to. Keeping these records does nothing for the calculation but expend memory.
Iterative Macro (Part 2 - File Manager):

V2 (Part 2 runs in ~8 minutes):

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Primary Optimization: switched to using pre-tokenized data, unlike Part 1. Part 2 data now looks like:

File Data	File Size
0	5
.	2
1	3
2	1

New iterative macro:

It seems like there is opportunity for further optimization, but this is what I have for now.

[gawa]

part1 was simpler than I thought at first glance. I tried to create Iterative macro but I realized it's not needed after 1 hour.

For part2, I just configured the required logic into Iterative Macro. No special trick is applied and it took 11 min.

I suppose there should exist a lot of trick to speed up but cannot come up with it for now.

[Yoshiro_Fujimori]

My solution.

Spoiler

Part1

Part2 workflow
The approach for Part 2 is different from Part 1. (I tried, but could not find the way.)
Not sophisticated (it took 48:47 minutes), but it worked anyway.

Part2 macro

[DaisukeTsuchiya]

P2 was tough Challenge. My WF run in 9min for P1 and P2.

Spoiler

P1 is no macro. P2 uses itteration macro.

[AkimasaKajitani]

Solved!

I realized that the logic was incorrect, so I had to remake the workflow that I had created several times.

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Part1: No macro
I solved it by breaking down the file into rows, reversing the order of free space, and joining them by row position. However, free space is larger than files, the end will be a bit strange, so the key point was how to deal with that.
 
Part 2: 
It would be a lot of work to break it down row by row, so I calculated the number of files and the free space and stuff them one by one into the free space from the back ID files. There are a total of 10,000 IDs, so I just repeated this 10,000 times. My workflow took 8 min for part1 and 2.

The point is that after the files are moved, there is continuous free space, so if you don't combine it well, you won't be able to pack the files as you intended. This is the last thing I noticed, and I ended up having to recreate the macro I created at the beginning (at first I thought it would be enough to just keep the free space in a loop, but in the end it turned out that I can't combine continuous free space unless I also have the file part).

[geoff_zath]

Workflow

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Macro

 

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[mmontgomery]

Day9. More in spoiler

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P1 was broken into a few steps: 1 was to convert the disk map into ID number and order. 2 was to move the file blocks and I did it without a macro. I wasn't sure if ID number 10 was treated as a number in one slot or broken over two slots. Fortunately I was able to figure out that answer quick

P2 was to build the macro to make sure an entire block could move left if the last item of the block could move over. Brute forced it and it took 45 minutes

[DataNath]

Finally finished up with day 9! Part 1 was fine. Explored a few different routes for part 2 and got there after a bit of nonsense.

Spoiler