Advent Of Code 2024

🙋 Questions
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1

Who is taking part in Advent of Code this year?

Starting December 1st and running through December 25th, a new programming puzzle is released every day. While puzzles are released daily, there’s no deadline—you can take your time. Plus, you can use any programming language you like!

The puzzles get progressively harder (especially after day 10), but it’s a great way to improve your programming skills. I’d love to see how other testers progress through the challenges.

I’ve setup a leaderboard, so we can see how others are doing on the challenges. It would be great to see more testers give this challenge a go, and share their experiences here.
Code to join the leaderboard is 2557629-7358e769
https://adventofcode.com/

Here is the leader board from last year (@pmichielsen - nice work)

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2

I’ll be doing the Advent of Cyber. Doing 2 advents is a bit too much! :smiley:

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3

Yes, you did this last year. How did you do?

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4

It’s an easy walkthrough but I have a lot of security experience so most came easy :smiley: Basically all offensive security tasks were easy and the blue team, I had to read carefully through the walkthrough :rofl:

With the uprising of machine learning, they put in some labs with machine learning things in, to hack them. It was fun!

They never take more then 1 hour of your time.

EDIT: TryHackMe | Cyber Security Training
You can check out the labs and their difficulty if you like from last year.

5

:raised_hand: I will. At least that’s the plan.
And why shouldn’t I, now that I have supported the project?
I can well imaging that hosting doesn’t get cheaper with more and more people participating.

Hope for entertainment, insight, fun and learning. (And I’m pretty darn sure we’ll get it! :smiley:)

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6

I will give it a shot again :slight_smile:

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7

Will try to participate this year, I am not that good at problem solving. Its been while since I have solved problem, will try my best this time :smiley:

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8

Always worth giving it a go. These challenges get so difficult, even on the first few days so I think anyone who attempts it is amazing.

Post a message if you get stuck, and we can always setup a zoom call to help each other out.

9

Oh yes, I’ve been making a small financial contribution every year since I learnt about Advent of Code. My programming skills have improved so much as a result of taking part in this challenge, so I hope they can keep it running for many more years.

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10

So far so good. :smile:

For me day 1 was fun and clearly not too hard.

Definitely the most… interesting learning was that I bumped into an issue with my development environment: Enabling YJIT (a just in time compiler) for recent Ruby versions seems to consistently crash (!) the whole computer.
Thanksfully, it seems to be fixed with the next OS update.

It’s rarely that I see things like this happening (and independent of the OS of choice).

Happy Advent of Code to all who participate!

Stephan

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11

A nice start to the challenge (I remember last years Day1 challenge being unusually tricky).

I’ve setup a testers leaderboard, just use the following code to join
2557629-7358e769

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12

Day 3 - Regex!!! - I always struggle to get it right. Might have cheekily used ChatGPT to help me out there.

Also made a silly mistake in part 2, took me a while to work out why it wasn’t working:

if(instruction.Contains("mul") && calculate){
 //do multiplication
}
else if (instruction.Contains("do")){
          calculate = true;
}else if(instruction.Contains("don't")){
          calculate = false;
}
13

How are people finding Dayt 6?
My code required some optimization. Initially, it was going to take an estimated 6 hours to run. I was able to get this down to just 30 minutes. Could have made further improvemetns, but decided to just let it run while I had some breakfast. It had completed by the time I returned to my computer - 2 more stars for me :partying_face:

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14

I’m always struggling with these grid-like puzzles. Getting tangled up in lots of nested loops and what not. I did manage though