[macintux]

For better or worse, adventofcode relies heavily on mathematical literacy that I suspect is neither all that common among developers nor all that important to most programming jobs.

Plus there’s no good way within the context of the puzzles to find out what mathematical trick you need if you don’t already know; you need to go find a virtual water cooler.

I may simply be biased because each year it reveals how little I know, but I much prefer interesting programming problems that don’t require me to go to Reddit, read other people’s description of what math is required, go learn the math involved, and then finally implement a solution.

[windowojji]

I'd hardly say it relies _heavily_ on obscure math tricks. Typically there's one or two days which require, perhaps, an undergraduate level of math which people would likely get in an intro class during a CS degree.

Most of the problems are around searching a space for some solution or just simulating some state changes. Recent problems involved implementing a higher dimensional version of Conway's game of life[0], a simple arithmetic expression evaluator [1], or a simulator for a simple number game[2] e.g.

The most recent one[3] involves solving a jigsaw puzzle by using a simple backtracking search (or any number of other methods). It's a bit complex, but not reliant on a particular math trick.

The vast majority of the problems in advent of code shouldn't require any math tricks, though they're often complex and involved, particularly as the month goes on.

[0] https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/17

[1] https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/18

[2] https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/15

[3] https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/20

[macintux]

Good point, I think I'm just scarred from this year's day 13. I had a perfect record up to that point.

[irowe]

Ugh. Day 13 part 2 was the only part I had to look up help on because it did rely on a weird math trick. Granted it was definitely covered in an intro to number theory course, but of course I didn’t realize that. Once I had the theorem in hand it was easy to implement.

[nik_0_0]

Interesting - I felt this way about Project Euler, which within the first few problems was exactly as you described - heavy mathematical literacy. I haven't gotten far into an Advent of Code since 2015 (~18 days), but have done the first 5 days of 2020; no mathematical literacy needed.

For 2015, and 2020 so far - its mostly text parsing, data structure building and basic iteration/permutations.

[sverona]

Project Euler 1-50, maybe 1-100, is similar in difficulty level to Advent of Code, I'd say. After that it quickly starts to become about how much number theory you know.

[thealig]

That's true, the later problems are thought-provoking but have prerequisites. I enjoy number theory but I won't mess with currently. I plan to go back to them one day, not sure though :P

[windowojji]

Project Euler is very specifically a website that requires both math knowledge and programming ability. It's designed to expose people to difficult math concepts, while advent of code is mostly explicitly for programmers.

[etimberg]

I haven't found this years aoc to be too mathematical either. It seems more parsing related, i.e. extract all this info from a line of text is the hardest part.

[na85]

Not only that but adventofcode seems to leverage purposely-obtuse input formatting as an artificial difficulty enhancement.

I stopped doing advent this year when I realized I was spending more time debugging my parsing than I was actually solving the problems. It's just not that fun for me to sometimes spend 2+ hours finding parse bugs before moving on to the actual puzzle.

[burnthrow]

The puzzles aren't fun at all. Like you said, they're basically "write a parser + complete a tedious word problem." They require substantial time investment for little creative reward, it's basically masochism.

Perl Advent Calendar is my jam.

[na85]

I dunno, some of them are fun. The ship navigation one this year was fun to solve, as was the gameboy emulator one.

[hackart]

This is my first year attempting adventofcode. But doing other things mentioned in this discussion would have been better use of time.

[sumeno]

There has only been 1 day this year that I think falls into this category (and only one or two last year as well).

They are almost all algorithm based rather than math based.

[Biganon]

I strongly disagree. I know nothing about math, yet I'm able to solve almost all the puzzles. The only time this year I was stuck because of math was a puzzle that required knowing about the Chinese remainders theorem, and even then, I've seen users solve the problem with their own intuitive method (which was obviously not as efficient as the theorem, but valid nonetheless).

[42_]

The type of problems you are referencing is less than 10% of all problems ever posted in AoC.

[macintux]

Yeah, I acknowledged my mistake in a sibling thread. This year’s math adventure wrecked my streak so that’s what I remember, ignoring the fact that I had a streak despite being math clueless.