Day 8: Playground
Megathread guidelines
- Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
- You can send code in code blocks by using three backticks, the code, and then three backticks or use something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ if you prefer sending it through a URL
FAQ
- What is this?: Here is a post with a large amount of details: https://programming.dev/post/6637268
- Where do I participate?: https://adventofcode.com/
- Is there a leaderboard for the community?: We have a programming.dev leaderboard with the info on how to join in this post: https://programming.dev/post/6631465
Re. what connections to process or not? That seems to be like one of those that’s either completely obvious when you implement your solution one way, and a nasty pitfall when you do it another. In this case, pre-computing the list of pairs to process vs. finding the next one when you need it.
spoiler
Stupider than that: I’d just got halfway through writing a complicated divide and conquer algorithm to calculate nearest pairs when I realised that I could just brute-force it. :-)
But yes, precomputing was definitely the way to go.