Now that Advent of Code 2024 has concluded, I wanted to get people’s opinion on what puzzles they especially liked looking back. This could be because of the puzzle mechanics, the description, because you are especially proud of your solution that day, or for any other reason.
Feel free to answer even if you only saw part of the puzzles.
My picks would be:
- 14 (Restroom Redoubt, robots moving into christmas tree shape). Even though it caught me off-guard in the moment, I did like that part 2 had this very imprecise requirement for once. Definitely made for varied, creative solutions.
- 15 (Warehouse Woes, robots pushing boxes) The second part was a fairly big complexity spike with just a minor change in the tasks. Basically a form of simulation where the hard part is finding a good data representation for the setup. I liked this one because debugging was such a visual process for me, by printing the grids.
- 17 (Chronospatial Computer, running a machine code) For me the first really tricky one, but still doable. These assembly puzzles are just neat. A lot of computation is started with a pretty small input, and the task is basically to really understand how this “computer” works.
What have been your favorites?
My favourites were the ones where memorization just made them instantly fast.
Day 11 was interesting, in that the logical (imo) data structure for part1 was completely incompatible with part 2.
I really liked the ones that had multiple valid approaches. Some of the challenges were solved basically the same way by everyone, which was a bit uninteresting.