copy pasting the rules from last year’s thread:

Rules: no spoilers.

The other rules are made up aswe go along.

Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    14 days ago

    Day 4 - Ceres Search

    discussion

    There’s probably a smarter way to do this…

    For part 1, I dumped everything into a matrix. Then I scanned it element by element. If I found an X, I searched in 8 directions from there and counted up if I found M A S in sequence.

    For part 2 I searched for an A, checked each diagonal corner, and counted up if the opposites were M S or S M

    https://github.com/gustafe/aoc2024/blob/main/d04-Ceres-Search.pl

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOP
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      Same, except in 4-1 I used a recursive function to traverse each direction according to the offset decided by the selected direction (like SW is row++,col–) , due to functional programming induced brain damage.

      Would have been pretty useful too if 4-2 turned out to be about finding longer patterns, instead of smaller and in half the directions.

      4-1

      Inlined some stuff to fit everything in one function:

      let rec isXmas (row:int) (col:int) (dir:int) (depth:int) (arr: char array2d) : bool =
          let value = arr.[row,col]
          if depth = 3
          then value = 'S'
          else if  [|'X';'M';'A';'S'|].[depth] = value
          then
              let (nextRow, nextCol) =
                  match dir with
                  | 1 -> row + 1, col - 1
                  | 2 -> row + 1, col
                  | 3 -> row + 1, col + 1
                  | 4 -> row, col - 1
                  | 6 -> row, col + 1
                  | 7 -> row - 1, col - 1
                  | 8 -> row - 1, col
                  | 9 -> row - 1, col + 1
                  | _ -> failwith $"{dir} isn't a numpad direction." 
      
              let rowCount = arr |> Array2D.length1
              let colCount = arr |> Array2D.length2
             
              if nextRow >= 0 && nextRow < rowCount && nextCol >= 0 && nextCol < colCount
              then isXmas nextRow nextCol dir (depth+1) arr
              else false
          else false
      

      Then you run this for every appropriately pruned ‘X’ times every direction and count the trues.