Time for Day 14!!!

I didn't write up day 12 but here's a Clojure video runthrough. I also didn't write up day 13 mostly because I hacked together my part 2 in Python and still want to rewrite it in decent clojure. In any event, all my solutions are up on GitHub.

Day 14 had a few interesting things going on. At its core it's a small machine simulator where you have to deal with binary numbers. One of the rubs is that the numbers are 36 digits which could be a problem if your language / machine uses 32 bits to represent integers.

Right off, assuming you have large enough ints you have an interesting choice. Do you work with the data them as numbers or do you just do string manipulations.

I decided to do part 1 as numbers which leads to a nice little exercise of using bitwise logic operations to turn bits on or off.

Part 2 was better solved, at least for me using string manipulations. That part had a nice little recursive subproblem - mapping wildcard values in the "mask" to all the possible combinations of zeros and ones.

Both problems also had a bit of fun parsing and, at least for me, a few neat clojure constructs.

I think you could turn this problem into a fun set of class exercises. My code can be found here and even if you don't do Clojure, you might want to check out the video runthrough: