this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Advent Of Code

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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev!

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.

AoC 2023

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Day 5: If You Give a Seed a Fertilizer


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)
  • Code block support is not fully rolled out yet but likely will be in the middle of the event. Try to share solutions as both code blocks and using something such as https://topaz.github.io/paste/ , pastebin, or github (code blocks to future proof it for when 0.19 comes out and since code blocks currently function in some apps and some instances as well if they are running a 0.19 beta)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Then I had the idea that the lowest number in the end must lie at the beginning of a range somewhere. Either the start of a seed range in the beginning or the start of a range in one of the mappings.

This really helped me out. I was stuck on either trying every single seed, or working backwards and trying every single location from 0 to infinity, and couldn't wrap my head around how to filter down the list to be manageable. Your comment made it all make sense.

In the end, was able to work backwards with the 172 lowest locations in each range to get potential seeds, and from there was able to get a short list of 89 valid seeds (including the original seed values) to then figure out which one has the shortest location.

Thanks!