Advent of Code 2021: Day 1

Wait, I Thought You Didn’t Like Coding Challenges

I mean…I don’t, really. I am definitely not into competitive programming or tricky dick algorithm optimization to get that .01% less CPU usage because somehow the standard library of the language, which is often about as fast as you’re going to get if there’s compiler optimization going on, is somehow not fast enough. ^{1 2 3}

But you’re right, dear reader, I don’t like LeetCode-style competitive programming challenges. Advent of Code is definitely not that though! For one, they’re all fairly short problems and don’t require you to retake Data Structures and Algorithms to be good at them, and for two, they focus on general programmatic problem solving, the most important part of developing, rather than hey what algorithm is this and implement it in the most optimal way possible. This is to say: I rather like them! They’re fun! They’re puzzles! They scratch my itch for coding and don’t require me to go on the OEIS every time! So I’m gonna (hopefully) do it this year, mmkay?

Day 1 Spoilers

The Problem

Given a list of ints, determine how many times the nth + 1 int is greater than the nth int.

The Solution

So ok, I’m lying slightly about the problem… you’re not actually given a list of ints. Hell, you’re not given anything other than a webpage! It is entirely up to you to grab the dataset and convert it into the format you need, which, ok, no big deal, let me just install requests real quick, grab that URL, convert it to text, split it into a list, map int to each elem and…realize I need a session cookie or auth token because the input is dynamically generated. Alright. Let’s try this again.

Given a webpage? Easy! Install requests, grab that url, put the session ID in my environment, grab that from the environment, pass it as a dict to requests.get, convert the results to a string, split that string, and list comp it so it’s actually ints! Yay!

SESSION_ID = os.environ["AOC_2021_SESSION"]
<!-- markdownlint-disable-next-line -->
URL = "https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/1/input"

def url_to_list_of_ints(url: str) -> list[int]:
    list_of_ints = [
        int(item)
        for item in requests.get(url, cookies={"session": SESSION_ID}).text.split()
    ]
    return list_of_ints

So it’s very obvious that we need to iterate over the list and do things with each value. Now, the tricky thing is is that a lot of the times you want to do something with an index of a list, you don’t actually want to use for index in range(len(list)) to iterate over the indexes themselves, since a lot of the times you’re just immediately going to get the value for that index anyway… this is why you use for index, value in enumerate(list) instead if you need the “every nth value” or whatever. Or, if you are trying to iterate over two lists the same length and use the index as a placekeeper, you instead do something like for av, bv, in zip(list_a, list_b) instead. But this time, I actually DID need the index, since I was looking ahead for the value after the one I was on and doing an if check on the difference between the two values:

def get_num_of_larger_measurements(measurements: list[int]) -> int:
    larger_measurements = 0
    for index in range(len(measurements) - 1):
        if measurements[index + 1] - measurements[index] > 0:
            larger_measurements += 1

    return larger_measurements

Wait, There’s a Part 2????

Given a list of ints, get the number of times the nth + 1 sum of the three item sliding window is greater than the nth sum of the three item sliding scale window.

The Solution (Again)

Well, despite being a little confusingly worded, this one isn’t that bad at all. Looking at the example shows it a little better:

199  A
200  A B
208  A B C
210    B C D
200  E   C D
207  E F   D
240  E F G
269    F G H
260      G H
263        H

def get_sliding_scale_num_of_larger_measurements(measurements: list[int]) -> int:
    sums = []
    for index in range(len(measurements) - 2):
        sums.append(
            measurements[index] + measurements[index + 1] + measurements[index + 2]
        )

    larger_measurements = get_num_of_larger_measurements(sums)
    return larger_measurements

Conclusion

Overall I quite enjoyed my experience! I didn’t ever feel stuck and I was able to knock it out over lunch. I know there’s varying difficulty so I’m looking forward to some tricker ones, but I really do think these hit a nice space where you can have creative freedom and be fluent in the language you choose without needing to retake DS&A :)

All code in full is in GitHub