gotta make them soviet connections 😁

https://youtu.be/PvT8Kx1WC64

Advent of Code is back this year and It starts tomorrow, December 1

Every day at 2:00LT until December 25 you will get a two part programming puzzle with a christmas theme.

https://adventofcode.com/

I first started doing it in 2021 but i only got to Day 5 (all 5 were in rust), i wasn't able to finish it and fully follow along with it because of school and stuff.

In 2022, i improved on it but still i couldn't finish the whole thing, I stopped after Day 14, but the cool part about the 2022 AoC was i was becoming a programming language polyglot and used Rust, Elm, Go, OCaml, TypeScript to solve the puzzles. I also was posting my progress here.

For this year's AoC my hope is to finish all 25 puzzles (with multiple languages). For most days i will be at uni in the mornings so i won't be able to solve the puzzles right after they are published at 2:00 LT, i will instead do them in the late afternoon or in the evening.

I will be publishing my solutions in this github repo
https://github.com/frectonz/advent_of_code_2023

PS: I have a mid exam tomorrow 😁 so i am probably going to do the puzzle in the evening.

Oops 😬

It looks cool though 🤣

[the tweet]

Human progress is a team sport.

I just completed "Trebuchet?!" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2023

Today's challenge mostly had to do with parsing the input correctly.

First part was easy, as always

In the second part i ran into a wall, all of the tests were passing but when i ran it with the main input, it didn't work (this is the worst situation to be in while doing AoC).

I was using this parser combinators lib called nom. What you had to parse was turning words to digits like this

"one" = 1
'two" = 2
...
"nine" = 3

but the thing i didn't notice while i wrote the parser was that

"twone" = 2, 1
"oneight" = 1, 8

The words could overlap each other and the problem was this didn't conform with how nom and most other parser combinator libraries work. Parser combinator libs scan the input string eating away the things they have parsed out.

For example, "twone" with the first implementation of my parser, would be turned into (2, "ne"), see how the "o" got taken away, that was the problem.

FInding out that this was a problem took me sometime but i finally figured it out.

So the lesson here is, "don't use a parser combinator lib for everything, sometimes regex is enough"

Model your data well and the algorithms you want will almost write themselves.