Day 8 looks to be a fun bit of deductive reasoning. Should be interesting! The premise: the wires for our seven-segment displays got jumbled up somehow. The puzzle text blames this on the sperm whale, but this is a weirdly specific sort of failure. I think it’s more likely that whichever elf wired these things up in the first place was having an off day and not really paying enough attention.

Day 6 promises to be an interesting one. While it may be day 7 today, I’m still playing catchup. Solution in the usual place. What we have is a population of fish. Lanternfish! Lanternfish are pretty fascinating. It’s thought that they make up nearly two thirds of the deep sea biomass. There are so many of them down there that, at first, scientists looking at their sonar readings thought they were reading an entire layer of water or even the seabed itself.

What trickery is this? I’m doing the day 7 puzzle on day 7? Well, as cute as the idea of crabs in tiny submarines coming to my rescue is, part 1 of the puzzle itself seems almost comically simple. The submarines all have a numeric position, and they need to move to a common position with the least fuel expenditure possible. It immediately strikes me that, given that fuel expenditure is equal simply to the the distance to the target point, the most efficient point to reach must be the median.

Following on from my previous unpost, I took a bit of a break and did day 4 today. Solution on my git repo as always. The premise is cute. There’s a giant squid attached to the submarine! What could it want? Why, to play bingo, of course! This makes perfect sense. Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) are well known for their love of games of chance, and their deep sea bingo halls are legendary.

Day 5! I was really hoping that our friend the giant squid would show up again, perhaps with dolphin racing tips, or even have brought friends for a few rounds of blackjack, but alas, it was not to be. No, this time around, it’s a navigation problem, and today we’re trying to steer around weirdly geometric hydrothermal vents. And, in the process, I received an object lesson on the importance of properly understanding the actual requirements before beginning.

I’m still doing Advent of Code, but as sort of expected, I’ve been a bit short of energy, so I haven’t been writing up my solutions like I did for day 1. But you know what? That’s okay, because my friend Emi Socks is doing its own writeup, and showing off why Haskell is so much fun to work with in the process. If you like my posts, it’ll defintely be worth your time.

Advent of Code is here again, and I’ve been looking forward to this! I’ve been doing AoC since 2019, so this will technically be my third year, though I’ve done some older puzzles in the meantime. My work from past years is available on my public git repository, and this year’s will be too. I started out with 2019 in Python, because Python was safe and familiar, while AoC was new and a little intimidating.

I liked day 8. It made me feel clever when I worked it out. Spoilers follow as usual, and my solution is here. There are a few classes of puzzle that show up time and time again in Advent of Code. One of these is the virtual machine puzzle. That's where it gives you some computer code, and the task is to make something that can run it. Remember I mentioned Intcode from 2019?

Day 7 was a bit more challenging than the last couple. As usual, spoilers for day 7 follow. This time around, the subject of our airline-based adventures was the baggage restrictions. Each bag is given a certain colour coding, and must contain a selection of bags of other colour codings based on a simple set of rules. The rules are a mere six hundred lines long, so not that different from real baggage restrictions.

Not much to write about for day 6, though the premise is again very relatable. It's nice to help people out when you're the only one that can make sense of a system, though I believe more in teaching them how to understand the system than doing the work for them. I'd far rather have someone say to me, "let me show you how to do it," than, "let me do it for you.

Curiously, day 5 was actually simpler than day 4. My solution is over on my git repo, and as always, this post contains spoilers for day 5 and earlier. First of all, I'm continuing to love the writing introducing the problems. Let me just quote the first paragraph verbatim: You board your plane only to discover a new problem: you dropped your boarding pass! You aren't sure which seat is yours, and all of the flight attendants are busy with the flood of people that suddenly made it through passport control.

I've been doing Advent of Code again this year, and this time I'm using it to learn Haskell. You can see my adventures with the first three days over in this thread on fedi, but my day 4 writeup ran a bit long, so I'm posting here instead. If you're doing Advent of Code yourself this year, then be aware that this post contains a detailed discussion of my solution to day 4, so consider this your spoiler warning.