Advent of code 2023

My solutions to aoc23. Code quality is non-existent here, I'm just trying to solve the problem with the approaches I come up with, mostly brute-force and or naive. I call it naive because most part 2 can't be solved with brute force, but most of them also don't require sophisticated algortihms to solve. I do minimal OO to avoid the boilerplates and I code mostly in imperative style, as that's what I'm used to. For more elaborate thoughts and high-level explanations of my solutions you can find it in days folder. For a dumb aoc folder, I'm being overly verbose with explaining things and providing instructions here, but it's mostly for myself in case I ever go back to it.

Final thoughts

I've never really tried aoc before. I remember back in 2018-2019 I only ever did a few problems before flat out giving up. This year I wanted to commit to it and see it through, and although there were some painful moments, such as day 17 where I couldn't get my Dijkstra to work no matter what I did, or solving the DP problem on day 12, or solving the equation system in day 24 part 2, I'm glad I stuck with it and finished it at the end. After all, aoc is what you make it to be, and I guess I wanted to see what I was capable of and hopefully learn something in the process. Now I know I suck at DP and the more mathy problems, so that's probably something I'll have to work on in the future.

Even though I needed some hints/help on some days and the fact that my solutions are far from perfect or even remotely elegant, I guess I will just take comfort in what Terence Tao once said:

It is not so much whether you succeed or fail an equation, it is whether you can learn something from it.

Finally, a big thanks to Eric Wastl et al. for creating the puzzles this year (and every other year), was fun and at times challenging!

Input data

Note that the input folder is not included, as it seems to not be allowed according to aoc policy. So you will have to add it yourself in the root project as a folder named input. Files added in the input folder should be named as day<day_number>.txt and day<day_number>sample.txt for the original input and sample input respectively. Note that if you are running the scraper, then the original input will be automatically added to the input folder along with the input folder if it doesn't exist. Currently, the sample input is not downloaded automatically and have to be added manually. Also, if samples differ for part 1 vs part 2, then include them as day<day_number>sample1.txt and day<day_number>sample2.txt respectively in the input folder and when running the script include -s and -ds flag.

To download the input files automatically from aoc, you need to include a scraping.ini file in the root folder of this project. The format should be:

[MAIN]
BaseUrl=https://adventofcode.com/2023/day
Delay=1
Retries=5
Scrape=True

[SESSION]
CookieSessionAOC=<Your-session-cookie>

Some exceptions

Input

Day 8 needs to be run with -ds flag along with -s if you want to run the samples, as there are designated samples for each part
Day 20 part 2 only works with the original input, while part1 works for sample and original input. It's mostly because of how part 2 was meant to be solved.
Day 24 part 1 lower and upper limit in p1 method has to be toggled depending on whether sample is running or original input.

Running time

As I mostly use brute-force and or naive approach, the running times of some problems, especially towards the end of aoc are slow.

Day 6 $\approx 6s$
Day 10 $\approx 1m$
Day 12 $\approx 5s$
Day 17 $\approx 3s$ part 1 and $\approx 8s$ part 2
Day 21 $\approx 2m40s$ part 2
Day 22 $\approx 40s$ part 2
Day 23 $\approx 30s$

How to run

Run pip install like so pip install -r requirements.txt.

Run main.py with the correct year, day and whether you want to use sample + original input py main.py -y 2023 -d 5 -s -o and something like this will print out:

day 5
input type: sample, part: p1, solution: 35, time: 0.00000 ms
input type: sample, part: p2, solution: 46, time: 0.00000 ms
input type: original, part: p1, solution: 551761867, time: 0.99993 ms
input type: original, part: p2, solution: 57451709, time: 1.00088 ms

Flags

Note that I've only solved aoc 2023, so the only valid year argument is 2023. I just preemptively added it in case I do more aoc in the future.