Ohai! Didn’t expect to actually be first lol, Leo Uino beat me for most of december. I guess they stopped doing them when they came out later in december (totally understandable)
Maybe it was due to attempting the puzzles in real-time for the first time, but it felt like there was quite a spike in difficulty this year. Day 5 (If You Give A Seed A Fertilizer) in particular was pretty tough for an early puzzle.
Day 8 (Haunted Wasteland), Day 20 (Pulse Propagation) and Day 21 (Step Counter) were (I felt) a bit mean due to hidden properties of the input data.
I particularly liked Day 6 (Wait For It), Day 14 (Parabolic Reflector Dish) and Day 24 (Never Tell Me The Odds), although that one made my brain hurt.
Day 25 (Snowverload) had me reading research papers, although in the end I stumbled across Karger’s algorithm. That’s the first time I’ve used a probabilistic approach. This solution in particular was very clever.
I learned the Shoelace formula and Pick’s theorem this year, which will be very helpful to remember.
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