Ask HN: Anyone Doing Advent of Code with ChatGPT?
I've been thinking that it could be an interesting idea to see how far it can go, and to document each step along the way.
- --- Day 1: Calorie Counting --- (verbatim copied and pasted the problem text)
To solve this problem, we need to read the list of food Calories and keep track of how many Calories each Elf is carrying. We can do this by keeping a list of the Calories carried by each Elf and updating the list as we read the input.
(gave the answer here in Python-like pseudocode)
(gave the answer in actual Python)
(worked)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "main.py", line 18, in <module>
ElfCalories[-1] += Calories
IndexError: list index out of range
The error IndexError: list index out of range means that you are trying to access an index in a list that does not exist. In this case, it looks like it is happening when you try to add the Calories to the current Elf (ElfCalories[-1] += Calories).
The problem is that you are not adding a new Elf to the list when you encounter the first non-blank line in the input. This means that when you try to add the Calories to the current Elf, the list is empty, so there is no -1 index to access.
To fix this, you can add a new Elf to the list when you first encounter a non-blank line in the input, like this:
(fixed the error)
(gives the answer)
(gives the answer but the code itself didn't work, so I manually copied and pasted the input file and added it to the folder, which then gave the right answer)>The Elves take turns writing down the number of Calories contained by the various meals, snacks, rations, etc. that they've brought with them, one item per line. Each Elf separates their own inventory from the previous Elf's inventory (if any) by a blank line. Find the total number of calories being carried by the elf who is carrying the most calories. Write Python code to solve this problem. This is the key paragraph from the problem description, plus the sentence asking for the solution.
The code it produced was correct, although it doesn't include reading the input from a file: https://pastebin.com/M00t217u
I then asked, "Can you modify the code to read the input from a file?"
Again, the code it produced was correct and it now reads from a file: https://pastebin.com/N6mcZu55
I then tried, "Can you make the code more memory efficient?".
It said, "Yes, we can make the code more memory efficient by avoiding the use of the intermediate list of lists that contains the number of calories for each Elf. Instead, we can directly compute the total number of calories for each Elf as we parse the input, and find the maximum value at the end. Here is an example:"
Today, I used it to solve Day 2 (rock/paper/scissors). It got pretty close, but had 95% of the logic correct.