Rules: no spoilers.
The other rules are made up as we go along.
Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.
Rules: no spoilers.
The other rules are made up as we go along.
Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.
Re: LCM, I figured my favorite Perl library
ntheoryhad 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)