this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
13 points (93.3% liked)

Advent Of Code

1226 readers
1 users here now

An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!

Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

Everybody Codes is another collection of programming puzzles with seasonal events.

EC 2025

AoC 2025

Solution Threads

M T W T F S S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12

Visualisations Megathread

Rules/Guidelines

Relevant Communities

Relevant Links

Credits

Icon base by Lorc under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient

console.log('Hello World')

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Day 11: Plutonian Pebbles

Megathread guidelines

  • Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
  • You can send code in code blocks by using three backticks, the code, and then three backticks or use something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ if you prefer sending it through a URL

FAQ

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

Rust

Part 2 is solved with recursion and a cache, which is indexed by stone numbers and remaining rounds and maps to the previously calculated expansion size. In my case, the cache only grew to 139320 entries, which is quite reasonable given the size of the result.

Solution

use std::collections::HashMap;

fn parse(input: String) -> Vec<u64> {
    input
        .split_whitespace()
        .map(|w| w.parse().unwrap())
        .collect()
}

fn part1(input: String) {
    let mut stones = parse(input);
    for _ in 0..25 {
        let mut new_stones = Vec::with_capacity(stones.len());
        for s in &stones {
            match s {
                0 => new_stones.push(1),
                n => {
                    let digits = s.ilog10() + 1;
                    if digits % 2 == 0 {
                        let cutoff = 10u64.pow(digits / 2);
                        new_stones.push(n / cutoff);
                        new_stones.push(n % cutoff);
                    } else {
                        new_stones.push(n * 2024)
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        stones = new_stones;
    }
    println!("{}", stones.len());
}

fn expansion(s: u64, rounds: u32, cache: &mut HashMap<(u64, u32), u64>) -> u64 {
    // Recursion anchor
    if rounds == 0 {
        return 1;
    }
    // Calculation is already cached
    if let Some(res) = cache.get(&(s, rounds)) {
        return *res;
    }

    // Recurse
    let res = match s {
        0 => expansion(1, rounds - 1, cache),
        n => {
            let digits = s.ilog10() + 1;
            if digits % 2 == 0 {
                let cutoff = 10u64.pow(digits / 2);
                expansion(n / cutoff, rounds - 1, cache) +
                expansion(n % cutoff, rounds - 1, cache)
            } else {
                expansion(n * 2024, rounds - 1, cache)
            }
        }
    };
    // Save in cache
    cache.insert((s, rounds), res);
    res
}

fn part2(input: String) {
    let stones = parse(input);
    let mut cache = HashMap::new();
    let sum: u64 = stones.iter().map(|s| expansion(*s, 75, &mut cache)).sum();
    println!("{sum}");
}

util::aoc_main!();

Also on github