News
Hints for Day 22 and Day 23; Clarification on Input Files
Written on 23.12.2022 22:33 by Sven Rahmann
Happy Holidays!
Yesterday (day 22) was relatively straightforward, at least part 1. However, part 2 is extremely annoying. It is likely that you will not have a general solution (that works for every layout), but just a solution that works for your specific layout. This is ok. I still found it extremely annoying. If you want to skip any problem, it could be this one.
Today (day 23) was also relatively straightforward; I found it advantageous to code the set of elves as a set of (i, j) coordinates. Note that there are 3 reasons for an elf not to move: (1) all adjacent spaces are empty; (2) no step in any direction is valid, hence none can be proposed; (3) a valid step is proposed but not executed.
A clarification because an earlier news was confusing: The input file should be named dayXY.txt for day XY, e.g. day01.txt for day 1 and day23.txt for day 23. Please commit these input files into your gitlab repository, together with your code file (dayXY.py). We may check you code on your input but also on our input files (day 22, part 2 being an exception; we do not expect it to run on input different from yours).
Hope this helps!