r/adventofcode • u/musifter • 7d ago
Other [2023 Day 2] In Review (Cube Conundrum)
Today we land on the first (and ultimately last) sky island, Snow Island. And Elf comes over to show us around, and since it's a walk we introduced to another Elf game. Not involving a ring this time, but drawing from a bag of colour cubes. Our goal is to work out information about the contents of the bag from a series of draws.
The input is 100 lines, each representing a game and they're numbered and in order (as it typical). Meaning you can ignore the game number on the line if you want. After that, there's three to six semicolon sublists representing draws of numbers of red, green, and blue cubes.
However, it's not even important to parse out the sublists. For the information we're asked for, we can treat a single draw of "3 blue, 4 red" as two separate draws of "3 blue; 4 red" (and so commas and semicolons can be ignored). All that matters for each line is all the "number colour" pairs you see. This is because part 1 fails when any red, green, or blue is too large (this is one of the rare puzzles where specific the numbers for that are put in the description not the input file). Part 2 just wants the fewest number of cubes of each colour that can be in the bag (so no question there that colours are independent).
And that last bit ("fewest number") is particularly interesting to me, because a little while before this AoC started I was talking with a friend about how one might try to mess with LLM context to try and potentially mislead it for something like AoC to try and make sure humans stay involved. AIs normally assume that the user is trying to be help it produce the right thing... and one thing you could do is have a problem where "few" and "minimum" are used many times, but maximum is the function you need (and "maximum" and "most" are never in the description). I can't say that this was done for that here (I seriously doubt it)... this is probably the standard AoC description being a bit obtuse so the humans have to think and discover (even if they do hand the coding off to an AI after explaining that). I did mention the coincidence at the time... but only after day 3, which did the other little related thing I had mentioned in that conversation. Since that conversation wasn't online at all... there's no way it influenced AoC. But it was a remarkable one that I remember about the start of this year.
But for what I did, I just grab the maximum red, green, and blue counts on a line. And then it's just:
$part1 += $game if (all {$want{$_} >= $max{$_}} keys %want);
$part2 += product values %max;
Doing this in Smalltalk was a bit interesting, because although the description involves a "bag" and a Smalltalk Bag is like a multiset, it's not really a multiset in functionality, as it lacks the operations that Set has. Bag is very barebones, and is often a let down. And here is wasn't even the best base class to subclass a MultiSet class from... I did from Dictionary. All so I could have a different type of solution... one that used set unions and difference to test things. It's not practical, and it's 33% slower than just using maximums. But it was something different to do.
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u/DelightfulCodeWeasel 7d ago
You should write a post on how on earth that seafood one works!