AoC 2017 Day 11: It's Full Of Hexagons

2017-12-11

Source: Hex Ed1

Part 1: Work on a hex grid:

\ n / nw +–+ ne /
-+ +- \ / sw +–+ se / s \

e>

That makes code for the actual question nice and clean:

origin = (0, 0, 0)

for line in lib.input():
    point = origin

    for direction in line.split(','):
        point = move(point, direction)

    distance_to_origin = distance(origin, point)
    print(f'ended at {point} ({distance_to_origin} from origin)')

Part 2: What is the furthest point from the origin visited?

Similar to day 8, we just need to track the maximum value seen thus far as we go:

for line in lib.input():
    point = origin
    furthest_distance = 0
    furthest_point = None

    for direction in line.split(','):
        point = move(point, direction)

        distance_to_origin = distance(origin, point)
        if distance_to_origin > furthest_distance:
            furthest_distance = distance_to_origin
            furthest_point = point

    print(f'ended at {point} ({distance_to_origin} from origin); furthest was {furthest_point} ({furthest_distance} from origin)')

That’s a pretty interesting problem as well.

$ python3 run-all.py day-11

day-11  python3 its-full-of-hexagons.py input.txt       0.0798640251159668      ended at (650, -313, -337) (650 from origin); furthest was (1465, -1070, -395) (1465 from origin)

  1. Not sure who’s being punnier here. 😄 ↩︎