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  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Seeing you implement gcd/lcm makes me think about the people who are gunning for the AoC leaderboards. What do they have that I don’t?

    Asking out of general interest and not any sort of feelings of inadequacy (I swear, behind a face of gritted teeth and obvious seethe).

    Like, do they have cron scripts to scrape the prompt and input as soon as it comes out? Libraries of util functions accrued from years of AoC participation? That’s all I’ve thought of and honestly it doesn’t sound implausible if you are hypercompetitive. Like I imagine they just have a raiders of the lost ark warehouse of boilerplate indexed in their memory palace to draw from. And I don’t have that and I am totally not envious at all.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Re: LCM, I figured my favorite Perl library ntheory had it, and I was right! This a godsend for Project Euler, too.

      (The first year of AoC leaned heavily on these kinds of problems, and Python itertools utterly destroyed the puzzles.)

      Re: leaderboard participants - I believe many of them are involved in programming contests, generally, and if you do enough of these, you recognize patterns, and you have routines for a lot of stuff. Also there are tools to download the puzzle inputs automatically.

      My personal take on how to do AoC: https://gerikson.com/blog/comp/adventofcode/Howto-AoC.html (maybe already posted, I don’t care)