Advent of Code 2022

Here are my solutions for Advent of Code 2022. I have written them in C++ to become more proficient in the language and compete in a private leaderboard from an internet community.

The code itself is not particularly good since I have not written in C++ for a long time and the goal is to solve the question as fast as possible.

https://adventofcode.com/

Global Ranking by Time

	Part 1			Part 2
	Time	Rank	Score	Time	Rank	Score
Day 1	00:10:42	5581	0	00:19:53	6730	0
Day 2	00:18:49	7702	0	00:25:09	6511	0
Day 3	00:24:15	8597	0	00:36:38	8156	0
Day 4	00:32:13	12036	0	00:46:51	12773	0
Day 5	00:34:35	6628	0	00:38:33	6066	0
Day 6	00:44:13	16782	0	00:47:10	16107	0
Day 7	01:21:27	8271	0	12:45:00	42901	0
Day 8	01:06:58	11252	0	02:24:00	13555	0
Day 9	01:05:57	8973	0	02:04:26	8643	0
Day 10	00:29:41	6257	0	01:34:44	9195	0
Day 11	01:20:11	7530	0	02:03:31	6108	0
Day 12	15:42:30	28770	0	15:48:35	27697	0
Day 13	14:57:25	25595	0	15:18:58	24622	0
Day 14	01:30:06	6276	0	01:41:15	5767	0
Day 15	02:00:25	6769	0	17:10:34	18939	0

Notes on My Approach to each problem

Day 1

• Don't need to use a max heap-- guess I panicked and immediately used it
• Should've have realized C++ does indeed have a sort function
• Not a very optimal approach
• Optimal approach is iterating through the file and inserting each calorie count into a max heap of size 3

Day 2

• This day should've been faster, many typos
• using a switch case if probably better, but am not familiar in c++

Day 3

• Took a lot more time today
• Gets a warning a the comparison
• Probably could use an array of size 52 instead of map for keeping track of characters
• That would save on memory since index will equal priority
• I don't need to use a frequency map, just a bool to keep track of seen chars

Day 4

• Took a long time to figure out how string splitting works in C++
• Using a set for Part2 intersection checking is unnecessary
• I have since looked up better approaches for input reading, sscanf() really simplifies this

Day 5

• I gave up on parsing this immediately
• Actual problem not too hard once the input is parsed
• I went up in placement a lot globally
• Went back and figured out how to parse the input nicely on day 6

Day 6

• Recognized this as a two pointers sliding window problem
• Still took too much time on this

Day 7

• Had to use a python script
• Went back the next day and did in in C++ later
• Faced issue where there are multiple folders with same name but different path

Day 8

• Took a while to figure out edge cases for part 1 and part 2
• Would've been more effective to draw out the problem and really think about cases

Day 9

• Very difficult to understand how the updateTailPosition() function should work
• Function went through many different implementations
• Had to draw it out

Day 10

• Kind of tricky to understand what part 2 is even asking
• Off by 1 errors are a pain to debug
• It actually doesn't print the last letter correctly. I just guessed the letter that looked most similar
• Still not sure what is causing this issue

Day 11

• Hardcoded the input to avoid the advent of parsing
• Part 1 not that hard
• Part 2 was only solved in time because I saw on a message board to modulo the worry values by the product of all test values
• I would not have decided to do that in 1 million years

Day 12

• Wrote a DFS for this that ended up being too slow, then I went to sleep for work
• Wrote a BFS the next day

Day 13

• Could not figure out how to parse this without looking up help online
• Solution for part 1 is based off a solution I found, I commented it throughout to fully understand the approach
• Solution for part 2 is mine and it's fairly slow

Day 14

• Took a while to write out, but no issues

Day 15

• Solved part 1 pretty easily
• Could not solve part 2 before bed time
• Spent about 2 hours on part 2 before realizing the issue was the result was too big for an int-- crazy

Run Locally

Clone the project

  git clone https://github.com/blake-c-aggienetwork/adventOfCode2022

Navigate to the desired puzzle

  cd adventOfCode2022/01

Compile the code-- I am using clang for this, update the $(CC) in the makefile to change

  make

Run the executable

  ./main.out