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

[FrederikE]

Spoiler

 

The last part of part. 2 I didnt do in Alteryx, but inserted the numbers into a LCD Calculator 😅. 

 What a challenge... 

[Qiu]

With the hint from @Mukai. 

Spoiler

[phottovy]

Full transparency, I needed a little help from reddit to understand how to solve part 2 without having my macro run for days:

Spoiler

For part 2, I was able to reuse a macro I built for Weekly Challenge 275-Greatest-Common-Denominator to calculate the LCM (this is the part reddit helped me understand)

[Yoshiro_Fujimori]

My solution. Macro over macro over macro...

Not sure if there is a better way, but at least I got the answer!

Spoiler

Main Workflow

[Laurap1228]

I cheated a bit on this one and did the last bit of part 2 manually using this LCM site.

Spoiler

[JarrodT]

Had to think through this one and analyze the input data to find patterns. 

Spoiler

[Gem]

@Laurap1228 Oop, thanks for the hint! As I was brute forcing my way through the problem, I ended up trying the LCM tool and it worked 😱 

Spoiler

[SeanAdams]

There is a trick to day 8 - read below.

Spoiler

The trick is that there are cycles in the data.
For example - the first source may cycle every 2 rounds; the second may every 3rd.
So what you need to do is use your P1 solution to independantly check the cycle time for each of the starting points and then find when they will coincide.

To figure out when they coincide - find the least common multiple.
- Do a prime factorize on each cycle time
- then find the numbers that includes all the combinations of Primes 

[AkimasaKajitani]

My solution.

Spoiler

It took me a while to realize that Part 2 required mathematical tricks.


Part 1 macro : 




Part 2 macro :

 

LCM macro : At the past Weekly challenge, we made the GCD macro. At that time, I made LCM macro using that GCM macro. I used this macro for this AoC.

 

 

[Pang_Hee_Choy]

Spoiler

part1: skips
part2: get LCM from online website... forget to remove comma, and waste lot of time for that...
built LCM macro afterward.
modified part1 macro to remove one macro file/