[sammorrowdrums]

Excellent comment, I did both parts last year up to day 17 and just had to stop, but learning about things like A* were really what made it worthwhile.

I have no formal CS training, but did a lot of online courses and so I use events like this to help plug gaps and learn new languages, and it would have been great to have a mentor like yourself through some of these puzzles last year as it can be quite hard to solve algorithm knowledge gaps etc. when also quickly trying to roll your own solutions.

Still, really a cool thing. I couldn't resist starting again today.

[will_pseudonym]

I'm in the same boat as you having no formal college/university CS training. You've given me a good idea for a blog series. Writing posts that go through the solutions I came up with for each day of AoC if I can do so without benefit of knowledge of useful algorithms & data structure concepts, and then reading the best solutions I can find on reddit etc, and write a blog post on how it works, as well as what underlying concepts it utilizes, and how they work. If I do that for all days/years of AoC, I could post a summary of the most useful concepts that I learned, that were applied to the most problems of AoC.