Advent of Code 2022 will start on December 1. This will be my third year, after participating in 2021 and 2020.

I hope to have time to code all of the solutions in Racket, my favorite programming language, and I should be able to translate some of them into Python and/or Javascript as a learning exercise.

My primary goal is to create an elegant Racket solution for each day’s puzzle that is clear, commented and tested. For some of the days, I may also create variants that emphasize performance or conciseness.

Advent of Code 2021 is about to start on December 1.

Advent of Code 2020

Some Racketeers mentioned the Advent of Code 2020, and I thought it would be fun to give it a shot this year. I’ll be discussing my solution to Day 1 Part 2, so if you haven’t completed it yet, you may want to hold off on reading further.

I added a advent-of-code–2020 directory within my LearningRacket repository where I’ll be adding my solutions.

Someone posted a question on comp.lang.ruby recently asking for help with solving anagrams. The poster originally asked about ways of generating permutations and several people pointed him to the facets library which has some permutation utility functions. As it turns out, I benchmarked the following naive permutation generator as 3 times faster than the facets library code:

I came across a little programming puzzle on comp.lang.ruby.

The author blogged about the original paper that got things started, but I haven’t had time to read it in depth yet.