Advent of Code

Project Advent-of-Code has collection of programming challenges glued by interesting background stories.

Stories are organized as Advent Calendar and are published daily during the Advent season. Each story/unit contains two related challenges. At the beginning you have access only to Part-A story/task. After solving the challenge the result (usually simple integer value) is evaluated and upon sucessfull verification the Part-B is revealed. Part-B is always related to Part-A and often uses the same input dataset. The educational aspect is that Part-B is more complex than Part-A and it is like generalization of Part-A. If implementation of Part-A is implemented correctly then adding solution for Part-B should be quite straightforward like adding new method or additional parameter etc.

The result is mostly simple integer value which is automatically evaluated. However, some units run-time can be in hours.

Valuable Features

There are some hard-to-find aspects (a.k.a. valuable featutes) of Advent-of-Code project to consider:

• interesting & funny
• two tiers educational aspect as part-a and part-b unit relation
• xfw (cholesterol free) web pages:
  • no adobe flash
  • no jquery animations
  • no megabytes of javascript crap
  • no cloud-flare, akamai and other cdn garbage
  • zen style minimalistic design (simplicity & functionality first)
  • creative retro ASCII art
• each task/unit has few testcases
• personalized input data
• evaluation of results

You will find here ...

basic implementation of advent-of-code tasks, mostly in Python 2.x [other implementations might follow as time permits]

• 2016 - 2016 Advent-of-Code
  • Unit: 2016/01 - Story: Day 1: No Time for a Taxicab
  • Unit: 2016/02 - Story: Day 2: Bathroom Security
  • Unit: 2016/03 - Story: Day 3: Squares With Three Sides
  • Unit: 2016/04 - Story: Day 4: Security Through Obscurity
  • Unit: 2016/05 - Story: Day 5: How About a Nice Game of Chess?
  • Unit: 2016/06 - Story: Day 6: Signals and Noise
  • Unit: 2016/07 - Story: Day 7: Internet Protocol Version 7
  • Unit: 2016/08 - Story: Day 8: Two-Factor Authentication
  • Unit: 2016/09 - Story: Day 9: Explosives in Cyberspace
  • Unit: 2016/10 - Story: Day 10: Balance Bots
  • Unit: 2016/11 - Story: Day 11: Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators
  • Unit: 2016/12 - Story: Day 12: Leonardos Monorail
  • Unit: 2016/13 - Story: Day 13: A Maze of Twisty Little Cubicles
  • Unit: 2016/14 - Story: Day 14: One-Time Pad
  • Unit: 2016/15 - Story: Day 15: Timing is Everything
  • Unit: 2016/16 - Story: Day 16: Dragon Checksum
  • Unit: 2016/17 - Story: Day 17: Two Steps Forward
  • Unit: 2016/18 - Story: Day 18: Like a Rogue
  • Unit: 2016/21 - Story: Day 21: Scrambled Letters and Hash

To Do

Possible future improvements and ideas (in arbitrary order):

• analyze resource requirements [memory, cpu]
• code optimization, profiling
• improved documentation
• implementation in multiple programming languages
• comparision of various implementations

History

version 2017.5 - the initial GitHub release in May 2017

keywords: advent, adventofcode, programming, challenge, puzzle, task, unit, design