Advents of Code (programming challenges)

[DavidM]

You're still way ahead of me, Pier. I just now finished part 1 of day 9. The basic algorithm for determining the "tail" position at each step wasn't so difficult, but the mass of data (11448 "steps" with the data provided) that had to be sifted through was a bit of a headache.

It's unfortunate that the site-generated datasets are so large, because most all of the puzzles I've seen so far are nicely applicable to the 50g. Some of them just have much larger volumes of data than are typically used on a calculator platform.

I can't imagine approaching these on anything other than an emulator, though. The speed of processing and how that affects debugging and testing would be painful on a real 50g. I'd estimate my day 9.1 solution would take close to 3 hours to complete on a real 50g. When working on this, I would "hit the wall" on memory issues at the very end of the processing cycle. So each iterative debugging step would have taken significant time to test.