I’ve solved all the puzzles by now, both part 1 and 2. Some have been quite tricky to solve. Other issues I’ve had — mainly stupid parsing problems.
Having an effective parser would be something that helps. Also, as someone suggested in the Swift forums, a (generic) grid would help since apparently many puzzles have a grid to navigate.
Already today I thought that the puzzle could be done using a graph. Went for maps (dictionaries) and arrays again, though. Unfortunately all my graph implementations I could reuse are either in Java or C++, and I’ve been doing everything so far in Swift. Maybe I’ll prepare a Graph struct/class in Swift just to be ready when it is needed….
Today’s part 2 was hard in a sense that the solution took almost eight minutes to run on my Mac Mini M1. Surely there should be a way to optimise. But — won’t do that, I already passed the challenge. I still am busy with teaching, so all these puzzles are done on extra time.
Anyways, today I rose to position 16 on private AoC Swift leaderboard. Even though I am not competing and skipping a day or failing a puzzle is no issue to me, it is nice to see that I do relatively well – so far…
By now I’ve used Sets, Dictionaries, arrays, ranges, string manipulation, string splitting, enumerations, and those grid operations. Let’s see what comes up tomorrow…