These are my solutions for Advent of Code 2020.
AoC is a popular yearly programming challenge in December. Each night from December 1-25, a new difficult word problem is released to the world at midnight EST. A challenge could be following hundreds of instructions to navigate a ship at sea, or keeping track of one million labelled cups shuffled ten million times. Solving part one of a problem unlocks a more difficult second part extension of the problem. Some problems took me over 5 hours of continuous work to complete. I avoided looking at hints or clues while making these, and the solutions are truly my own. Completing one part of a challenge grants you a golden star, and I was able to earn all 50 after many hours of work and problem-solving. I've included some of my statistics below.
Each day required a creative, optimized solution in order to find an answer in a reasonable time. There are no restrictions on how you choose to solve a problem. Python 3 was my tool of choice.
Animations generated from Day 11
Each day I would try to solve a problem as quickly as possible. Below are some
statistics given by the site on how well I did compared to other users. Everyone
gets access to the problems at the same time (12:00pm EST). Each day has a
Time and Rank for both part 1 and part 2.
Time shows how long it took me to submit a correct solution after a problem's
release. Completing part 1 logs a time and unlocks part 2.
Rank A rank of 1,000 would mean I was the 1,000th person to complete that part
of a challenge. A smaller number is better.
Each day could have anywhere from 10,000 to over 100,000 users submitting answers, and I'm satisfied with my performances. I've included all the data in a table and some aggregate data below.
----Part 1---- ----Part 2----
Day Time Rank Time Rank
25 00:19:37 1423 05:07:59 5105
24 00:22:15 1249 00:47:28 1309
23 00:47:30 1968 >24h 11024
22 00:09:52 1059 03:11:45 4095
21 00:43:58 1777 00:47:58 1424
20 01:16:05 1801 05:18:06 1561
19 01:27:58 2552 04:13:11 3089
18 01:43:05 4634 01:54:37 3606
17 00:34:47 1402 02:00:06 3918
16 00:15:50 1280 01:30:48 3256
15 01:10:49 6162 01:22:33 5138
14 00:26:58 2467 01:18:30 3282
13 00:20:49 4479 03:41:06 5069
12 00:11:06 1004 00:28:35 1437
11 00:55:57 4828 01:29:44 4497
10 00:13:22 3736 02:45:43 7487
9 00:09:27 1934 00:16:24 1554
8 00:07:57 1475 00:18:22 1377
7 00:26:46 2018 01:27:52 4915
6 00:05:45 1479 00:11:27 1513
5 00:09:32 1116 00:12:32 864
4 00:26:57 5359 >24h 73891
3 00:07:21 1435 00:12:00 1341
2 00:07:21 1461 00:15:15 2114
1 00:50:59 5530 00:52:35 5010
| Part | Median Time | Median Rank | Fastest Time | Best Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part 1 | 00:22:15 | 1801 | 00:05:45 (day 6) | 1004 (day 12) |
| Part 2 | 01:27:52 | 3282 | 00:11:27 (day 6) | 864 (day 5) |
The programs I came up with are included in this repository organized by day.
You can run them yourself by installing Python 3 and
executing the run.py file contained in a day's folder.
# example command to run day 20's solution
cd 20
python run.py