The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security. That’s about where I am today!

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

AoC 2022 Day 5: Stackinator

2022-12-05

Source: Supply Stacks

Part 1

Given a list of stacks of syntax 1 and instructions in the form syntax 2, apply each instruction to pop qty items from the stack src and put them on dst one at a time.

Syntax 1: Stacks

    [D]    
[N] [C]    
[Z] [M] [P]
 1   2   3 

Syntax 2: Instructions

move 1 from 2 to 1
move 3 from 1 to 3
move 2 from 2 to 1
move 1 from 1 to 2

AoC 2022 Day 4: Overlapinator

2022-12-04

Source: Camp Cleanup

Part 1

Given a list of pairs of spans (of the form a-b,x-y) count how many spans have one span entirely contained within the other.

AoC 2022 Day 3: Rucksackinator

2022-12-03

Source: Rucksack Reorganization

Part 1

Take a list of characters. For each line, split the line exactly in half and find the one character that’s in both halves. Assign a-z to values 1-26 and A-Z to 27-52. Sum these values.

AoC 2022 Day 2: Roshamboinator

2022-12-02

Source: Rock Paper Scissors

Part 1

Given a list of Rock Paper Scissors matches with A,B,C or X,Y,Z corresponding to those plays and scoring 1,2,3 points for your play plus 0,3,6 for a loss, draw, or win, what is your total score.

AoC 2022 Day 1: Calorinator

2022-12-01

Source: Calorie Counting

Part 1

Given multiple lists of numbers, find the list with the largest sum.

Advent of Code 2022

2022-12-01

Let’s do this thing!

I’m going to try Rust this time, since it’s 1) awesome 2) fast and 3) crazy. :D

Let’s see how it goes!

If you’d like to see the full form of any particular solution, you can do so on GitHub (including previous years and possibly some I haven’t written up yet): jpverkamp/advent-of-code

Stateful Solvers and Iterators

2022-10-16

Rust, yet again! Let’s take what we did last time with Solving Sudoku (again) and improve the code structure a bit more.

Goals:

Create a ‘Solver’ struct that can maintain state (such as how many states we’ve visited, how much time we’ve spent)
Track the above stats
Turn the ‘Solver’ into an iterator which will iterate through given solutions (a single call will give the first solution or you can run through the iterator to get all of them)

If you’d like to follow along, I’ve started uploading the code here: https://github.com/jpverkamp/rust-solvers

Solving Sudoku (again)

2022-10-04

More Rust! This time, I want to go back to my post on A Generic Brute Force Backtracking Solver. For one, because I’m learning Rust. For two, because there is a crate specifically for im mutable data structures. And for three, because I expect it will be much faster. We shall see!

Cleaner Lunar Arithmetic in Rust

2022-10-02

Another day, a slightly better way to implement Lunar Arithmetic in Rust. Give the previous post a read if you need a quick refresher on what Lunar integers are. Otherwise, here are two better (I hope) ways to solve the same problem.

Lunar Arithmetic in Rust

2022-09-21

I’ve been playing with various languages / language design a lot recently (inspired by my Runelang series). As I tweak and change what I’d like to implement in a language… I kept finding myself coming back to more or less exactly how Rust looks (albeit without the borrowing). So… that seems like a pretty good reason to start picking up some Rust. In another thread of thought, I stumbled upon two OEIS (on-line encyclopedia of integer sequences) sequences: A087061: Array T(n,k) = lunar sum n+k (n >= 0, k >= 0) read by antidiagonals and A087062: Array T(n,k) = lunar product n*k (n >= 1, k >= 1) read by antidiagonals.