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by windowojji 2010 days ago
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

1 comments

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