1.3 KiB
Day 6: Trash Compactor
This marks the halfway point of the Advent of Code for this year, and so far, I've been really enjoying the whole process.
Puzzle 1, again, took 30 or so minutes. Puzzle 2, a little over an hour.
I did manage to do these back-to-back on the night of release (thanks to the extra time afforded by the weekend), even though it took me until after 2 AM to finish (that's OK, I don't have anything to do in the morning).
I initially tried to keep my parsing from Puzzle 1 for Puzzle 2, but after getting unexpected results, I could see the errors of my ways (the rows that the individual numbers appear in are not arbitrary and do not follow a simple patterns, like being aligned to the most or least significant digit). Going back to the drawing board, I realized that the key was to know where the break points are, and use them to trigger the necessary calculations. Finally, I needed to add the last result (after the for-loop exits).
One more general thing to note - I don't normally use for-loops in my work code (since we're mostly transforming arrays, we use map or reduce), so I've been enjoying the reliance on them (it reminds me of my early days writing BASIC).
Anyways, these were fun, I look forward to the rest of the puzzles!
JS Solutions
cd js
node day06a.js
node day06b.js