As I did with last year / yesterday, I’ve written up a series of posts for the Advent of Code 2017 problems. Again, I didn’t manage to write them up as I did them, but this time around I least I finished mostly on time.

As before, these problems are best if you take a crack at solving them yourself first. If that’s your thing as well, stop reading. This post isn’t going anywhere.

If you’d like to see the full form of any particular solution, you can do so on GitHub: jpverkamp/advent-of-code

My particular favorites this year:

• Day 9: Garbage Gobbler - Uses PyParsing to parse an interesting input language
• Day 10: Knot Cool - Implement a custom hashing function
• Day 11: It’s Full of Hexagons - Movement on a hex grid
• Day 14: Knot Hash Gridinator - Re-using day 10’s hash function + visualization
• Day 16: Swing Your Partner - Optimization that cut runtime from two hours to less than a second
• Day 18: DuetVM - Virtual machines and programmatically generated music. What could be better?
• Day 20: Miniature Universe Simulator - Particular simulation + cool animated gifs
• Day 21: Fractal Expander - Procedurally generated images + more animated gifs
• Day 22: DuetVMC - Compile DuetVM code to Python, plus reading assembly and hand optimizations

Or a full list of all of the posts:

And if you’re curious, here are links to the two previous years:

• Advent of Code 2015
• Advent of Code 2016

Perhaps next year I can do this on time again. 😄