Advent of Code 2016 started – daily programming puzzles until Christmas | Hacker News Reader

Advent of Code 2016 started – daily programming puzzles until Christmas

adventofcode.com

From the About page: "Advent of Code [created by Eric Wastl - JSc] is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme."

I've had great fun with Advent of Code last year, competing with a group of friends and colleagues. You can set up a private leaderboard for a group, and watch the progress of the participants.

It can be addicting though. If you attend some social event (dinner, party, sports game) you fear that your colleagues are passing you on the leaderboard.

A little more explanation on the challenges themselves: The challenges (at least: the ones in the 2015 edition) are stories in a Christmas setting. The American version of that, so focussing on some question/problem that Santa Claus has: how to distribute packages on a sleigh, how many miles to travel between some cities, how many packages to distribute according to some rule for brave kids, how much paper and ribbon does it take to wrap a set of presents.

The programs that you write (if you don't want to solve it by mathematical/brain powers) focus on things like sorting, combinations, counting, grids, trees, graphs, other simple data structures around some fairly basic logic. Nothing too advanced, although sometimes you need to deploy some smart memoization trick (and take the complexity into account, O(log n) is better than O(n!) ) to push the execution time down. You want an answer before Christmas, not before when our Sun expands into a Red Giant. The programs typically are between 5 and 50 lines of code.

I still haven't beaten it, because I suck :-(.

Speaking of which, anybody know any good resources for learning algorithms and datastructures, so I can actually know this stuff?

Oh, and in the beginning of January, after AoC completed, we hosted a knowledge-exchange session - our company organizes a mini-conference every two weeks, attended by all colleagues. The "Show me the code"-session was an opportunity to share solutions, approaches, tactics that didn't work, and creative discoveries. Entertaining and interesting!

This is great. I never finished last year's (because I suck), but I learned a lot. They say premature optimization is the root of all evil, but it doesn't really sink in until you optimize for two days, only to realize the naive solution works fine, and you just wasted a lot of time.

I'll give this a whirl but at a slower pace than one/day. Already feeling mild irritation towards the easter bunny.

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