I see the leaderboard is gone too. Unfortunate but entirely predictable given how the last 2 years went.
That being said, I was worried he'd cancel the entire thing, so this is still good news!
That being said, I was worried he'd cancel the entire thing, so this is still good news!
- The puzzles get published in the middle of the night for most of Europe, can't we have a better system like scoring on <arbitrary other metric the poster likes better>.
- It's weird that many of the pages say "just have fun, it's not a race" and then also there's a prominent leaderboard page to show who's currently ahead in the race.
- There's been people taking the whole thing way too seriously from basically year 1, trying to load their puzzle input as fast as possible by polling every 10 ms and putting too much load on the servers.
- Whether AI is allowed is always a super toxic discussion with no real outcome because you can't enforce it.
But I also understand the decision. Fun while it lasted, but I'll find other ways to have fun with AoC this year!
It’s like excitedly arriving to a potluck with your beef bourguignon, only to find twenty michelin-starred chefs competing against each other.
Not exactly my idea of “fun” :) to me AoC was much more of a neighborhood party than an olympic event.
As for when it's been solved a thousand times: 2022 I did part1 and part2 and was finished after 4m36seconds, and that gave me rank 1070. So don't underestimate how many who did this competitively, heh.
QRD? Was it AI?
IMO the levels it got to was wildly out of proportion, even if these people were cheating (say what you will about AI, but if the rules say not to use it and you do: you're a cheater) but maybe I would have felt differently if the timezones meant I could take part, rather than waking up to drama.
I never followed this challenge aside from doing a few 10 years ago in college.
If speed to problem completion matters though, then question release time will be brutal for some.
But yes, you would have people openly share repositories for automatically ingesting the puzzle text, solving the puzzles, and submitting the results the moment the puzzles opened, leading to inhuman solution times. So, despite the rules stating that you can't do that, the result is that whenever the puzzles were easy enough for an LLM to solve them with high probability – and most of them are – the leaderboards would be overrun with such solutions.
In 2023, the LLMs would still struggle enough that the overall leaderboard (taking all 25 ⋅ 2 puzzles into account) would still be dominated by ordinary people (many of them recording their solutions), in 2024 that was no longer the case. Personally I would go from being able to top 100 regularly, to almost never being able to. I'm going to miss the thrill, and think it's a bit saddening that we can't have nice things, but also ultimately think that getting rid of it is the best option.