As usual a wide range of topics were covered including binary numbers, pattern matching, simulation, dynamic programming, mathy stuff, parsing, graph algorithms and more.

I didn't find myself totally lost on any questions. There were some problems that at least to me seemed to require graph algorithms and one where dynamic programming or at least memoization was a boon but for the most part it seemed that problems were indeed approachable. Even the math day that had a bunch of reddit chatter over the Chinese Remainder Theorem could be done without knowing about the CRM. That was good because I had never heard of it (and if any of the redditors who mentioned that it should common knowledge, it shouldn't - I have an undergrad in CS and a Masters in CS along wit 30 years of teaching and this is the first time I've seen it).

In past years there always seemed to be a few problems that you needed some preexisting knowledge to attempt. I had no problem with that - no need to have to finish all the problems and there's nothing wrong with hitting up reddit, learning something new and then tackling the problem. This year it seemed that the problems more directly led to the knowledge. I'll talk about this more later.

For the most part the problems were the perfect size for me. I'd read the problems when I woke up, work on part 1 after my run and then part 2 later in the day - at least that was the ideal - bugs and life sometimes got in the way. None of the problems required pages and pages of code for the solutions which I liked. Problems were clever and interesting but led to moderately sized solution.

In past years, the weekend problems were longer and/or harder. The logic being that there's more time to work on them. I never liked that. AoC is great but it's an add on. It's an add on to work during the week but it's an add on to family time on the weekend. I liked that this year the only weekend problem that was much larger and longer was day 20 - the image reconstruction.

This is not to say that some problems didn't take a good deal of time but rather that once you had an approach you didn't sit down and say "oh man, now I have to write hundreds of lines of code to implement this."

In spite of my not finishing part 2 until the last day, I loved day 20 - Jurassic Jigsaw. It was a little long and I spend more time than I care to admit on debugging a really silly error but I loved the problem.

Why?

First, it had staged difficulty -

1. Parse the data into a reasonable representation
2. Do a partial edge matching for part 1 (not so hard)
3. Do the harder / longer matching to reconstruct the image
4. Remove the border and solve the problem.

Second, you actually discovered something - you found sea monsters!!!! You had a problem with an "unknown" solution and you figured it out. Contrast that with say, day 2 where you just had to validate passwords. That was also a fun problem but there was no big reveal. It was really cool to decode your image and actaully find the hidden monsters.

Day 16 and 21 allowed for similar discovery at the end but not quite as cool. I liked 16 very much but had a hard time getting my head around the example for 21. Still a cool problem.

As usual, I found a lot that I liked as a teacher in AoC. I love that many of the problems introduce problem solvers to new things. For me, the Chinese Remainder Theorem was new even though I only discovered it via the subreddit. Cellular Automata was prominently featured this year, binary explicitly mentioned as was recursion.

The recursion problem was particularly nice. The setup led to and, if I recall, explicitly mentioned recursion. It also talks about a key challenge - data mutability. The question states that after returning from a "subgame" - the recursion - you have to continue the original game from where it left off - state management. If you're language passes references in your calls this could lead to trouble. I'm guessing (hoping?) that for people who solved that day who were new to recursion got a deeper understanding than just through the usual n! and such.

Another thing I liked was the spiraling. That, in teacher talk, is when you go back to an earlier topic. This year had three questions based on Cellular Autoamta. The first was the basic, the next took you to a higher dimension and the third to a different shape. Each one reviewed and extend fro the earlier problem. I loved it. This might sound similar to last year's intcode but the difference is that evne if you didn't complete the earlier problems you had a shot at the latter ones. With Intcode if you had something wrong with your earlier interpreter you were out of luck.

The allergens problem also allowed for the use of the same method you used to solve the boarding pass problem.

Loved the spiraling.

I could probably go on but this post is already long enough.

I'll finish off with links to my earlier posts on Advent of Code.

Already looking forward to next year.

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