this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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3 a
I read this wrong initially and thought that you only needed to check adjacency on the same line. Whoops! Then I wrote a bad algorithm that finds numbers THEN searches for symbols. That alg isn't inherently bad, except...3 b
If I had chosen a symbol first approach, I would not have had as much pain as I did here. Also, I probably under and overthought this one. I went with my first idea, which was guaranteed to work.The approach this time was:
A simpler approach would consider that you only have two numbers on the same line for the same gear if the character in the gear column is a non-digit; otherwise, if a number is adjacent to a gear, there is only one on that row. Union-find is completely overkill, but I like using it even when I don't need to.
Anyway, upon reflecting on this, while the general approach is fine, I didn't think too hard about the implementation and just ended up with globs of overly memoized spaghetti. I probably should check if Dart has a python-like tuple object or similar. Whatever. Behold!
3b redux
I took out the union find, the code is simpler and more readable now. I also leaned in to using null values, which is gross but whatever, it works.