My Praise of Advent of Code 2016

During the last days of December I was pleasing my internal need for solving puzzles and tricky tasks by going through Advent of Code 2016 challenge.

The idea is simple: every day since December 1st to 25th, the site publishes a new brain teaser. They are all aligned into one story: the Bad Easter Bunny has stolen all the Chrismas gifts from Santa, and now you are the hero who should break into the Bunny’s headquarters and save the gifts for the kids.

Having said that, each challenge is independent from the others, so you can solve them in arbitrary order if you want.

Advent Calendar in dark ASCII

A puzzle consists of a description and an input data set associated with it. The solution is typically represented as a number or a short string, so it can be easily typed into the textbox. However, to get this solution you need to implement a program: computing it manually is not feasible.

I started a bit late and got just the first 11 puzzles solved. Each puzzle is doable in one sitting, usually half-an-hour to a couple hours of work, which is very nice.

Some problems are purely about the correctness of your solution. The most engaging tasks were also computationally intensive, such that a straightforward solution took too much time to run to completion. You need to find a shortcut to make it faster, which is always fun.

You collect stars for providing the correct answers

Apart from generic joy and satisfaction that one gets from solving programming challenges like these, I also consider it a good opportunity to try a new programming language or a paradygm.

As I said, the tasks are relatively small, so you can feel the sense of accomplishment quite often, even being not very familiar with the programming language of choice.

There are many other people solving the same puzzles and also sharing their solutions online. You can go and find the other implementations of a task that you just solved, and compare it to your approach. That’s the great way to learn from other people, broaden your view and expose yourself to new tricks, data structures and APIs.

I picked F# as my programming language for Advent of Code 2016. I chose to restrict myself to immutable data structures and pure functions. And it played out really nice, I am quite happy with speed of development, readability and performance of the code.

Solution to one of the puzzles

You can find my code for the first 11 puzzles in my github account. Full sets of F# solutions are available from Mark Heath and Yan Cui.

I included one of the solutions into The Taste of F# talk that I did at a user group earlier this month.

Next year I’ll pick another language and will start on December 1st. I invite you to join me in solving Advent of Code 2017.

Kudos to Eric Wastl for creating and maintaining the Advent of Code web site.