tinc2k/advent2018

Half-assed attempt at 2018 Advent of Code

Advent of Code 2018

Half-assed attempt at 2018 Advent of Code.

Will try to update with improvements and summarize what I've learned each day.

01a

• originally wanted to set up to pull data on each run using node-fetch, but learned that's dumb because input doesn't change & we probably shouldn't unnecessarily bomb the server with requests
• don't think runtime can be greatly improved from first draft, as we're doing one pass over array (~6ms)

01b

• first run was quite inefficient (~10s on my laptop w/ i7-4558U) due to using array to store a list of frequencies, and doing linear search on each iteration to look for duplicates
• first rewrite used JavaScript prototype's ability to add arbitrary attributes (~85ms)
• second rewrite used native Set type for additional performance gain (~35ms)

02a

• readable but likely too verbose (~16ms)
• tried rewrite calculateRepeats() using native Map type for tiny performance improvement (~10ms)
• another performance improvement using object literals to avoid checking for first match (~6ms)

02b

• first run crappy/inefficient - O(n^2)? (~48ms)
• added limiters on first discovery & diff >1 (~12ms)

03a

• algo didn't calculate correctly on first two runs: i was off-by-one on shape-drawing loops
• parsing was PITA, should figure out if there are parsing filters/masks I can use in JavaScript
• TODO figure out better string parsing method

03b

• TODO bonus: print out canvas

04a

• first solution an absolute shit show in terms of readability
• new trick: use new Array(length).fill(value) to initialize values
• TODO figure out if we can remove moment and use native Dates

04b

05a

• strings are immutable, duh
• obvious from example we should avoid multiple passes through polymer

05b

• attempted rewriting remove() to not use the nasty string.split().join() thing to remove all occurences of particular character, rewrite sucked because it involved more array operations