diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | src/blog/advent-of-code-2020.html | 91 |
1 files changed, 91 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/src/blog/advent-of-code-2020.html b/src/blog/advent-of-code-2020.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..3b78433 --- /dev/null +++ b/src/blog/advent-of-code-2020.html @@ -0,0 +1,91 @@ +title: Advent of Code 2020 +date: December 25, 2020 17:35 +--- +<p> Merry Christmas to all!</p> + +<p> +<a href='https://adventofcode.com/2020'>Advent of Code 2020</a> has come to an +end. At the time of this writing, around seven thousand people finished the +whole thing, out of the 150000 that had submitted a solution to the first day's +problem. And I'm one of them! +</p> + +<p> +You can see my solutions <a href='https://gitlab.com/m-chrzan/aoc2020'>here</a>. +I started out with C, moved on to Ruby, and near the end switched to Lua. I'm +going to need some Lua knowledge for the Redis section of the databases class +I'm taking right now, so AoC was a good time to get familiar with the language. +</p> + +<h3>Thoughts on AoC 2020</h3> + +<p> +I found most of the problems fairly simple, but it was fun to go through them +all anyways. +</p> + +<h4>Most Tedious Award goes to...</h4> + +<p> +<i>Day 20 Part 2</i>. My solution ended up being a good 340 lines of Lua split +between two scripts. This is the last problem I solved because I knew it would +require a lot of work to get working, so I procrastinated on it until the end. +</p> + +<p> +In the end, the process of solving this was actually kind of fun, and getting +the final solution satisfying. I think it might have something to do with the +geometric/visual nature of the problem. There's just something nice about +rotating and flipping ASCII squares with code, and seeing them all line up +correctly in the end. +</p> + +<h4>Most Cheesed Award goes to...</h4> +<p> +<i>Day 19 Part 2</i>. Rather than implementing a parser generator that could +handle this grammar by hand, I bodged together a +<a href='https://gitlab.com/m-chrzan/aoc2020/-/tree/master/19/b'> + Bison (aka Yacc) solution +</a>. It's not very pretty, especially the Bash script that just calls the +parser with each input word separately and counts how many times it didn't exit +with a syntax error. But it works! And I finally learned something about +Bison/Yacc and Flex/Lex, which I've had indirect exposure to before, but never +actually used. +</p> + +<p> +I was quite pleased with my Part 1 solution though, where I implemented a simple +recursive parser generator. +</p> + +<h5>Runner-up in the Most Cheesed category</h5> +<p> +<i>Day 13 Part 2</i>. I'll admit it, I just copied a Chinese Remainder Theorem +implementation from Rosetta Code. I'm sure the Python guys just used +<code>numpy</code>'s CRT, so treating it as a library function doesn't seem too +cheaty for me. +</p> + +<h4>Most Fun Award goes to...</h4> +<p> +Probably a tie between the already mentioned <i>Day 20 Part 2</i> and <i>Day 19 +Part 1</i>. Day 20 had that cool geometric component and satisfaction of +putting a puzzle together, but I'm a sucker for recursive parsers implemented +with higher order functions. +</p> + +<h3>Thoughts on Lua</h3> +<p> +Learning Lua was probably the most useful outcome of this year's AoC for me. I +feel pretty comfortable with the basic constructs of the language, and even +played around a bit with metatable-driven OOP. I don't know how closely I stuck +to general conventions, and didn't interact with any external libraries, but can +definitely read and write the language comfortably now. +</p> + +<p> +My one sentence summary of feelings towards Lua is that Go is to Java what Lua +is to Python/Ruby/JavaScript. Its very small vocabulary means you learn the +language quickly and don't need to think much while writing it, but your +programs can end up more verbose than the equivalent Ruby/Python. +</p> |