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… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

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

AoC 2024 Day 8: Vectorinator

2024-12-08

Source: Day 8: Resonant Collinearity

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a grid with either open tiles (.) or towers (anything else), for each pair of towers, there is an antinode at each of the points that is 2x as far from one tower as the other. How many antinodes are there still within the bounds of the map?

AoC 2024 Day 7: Mathinator

2024-12-07

Source: Day 7: Bridge Repair

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a result and a list of numbers, determine if any combination of addition (+) and/or multiplication (*) using all the given numbers in order can return the result. Ignore order of operations.

AoC 2024 Day 6: Wanderinator

2024-12-06

Source: Day 6: Guard Gallivant

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

You are given a grid of walls (#), floors (.), and a guard (^, initially facing up/north). The guard walks forward until they run into a wall at which point they turn right. How many tiles does the guard reach before leaving the map.

AoC 2024 Day 5: (Not) Transitivinator

2024-12-05

Source: Day Day 5: Print Queue

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

The input is a list of pairs of the form a|b which defines that b must not come before a, an empty line, and then a list of values a,b,c,d.
For each line that is valid for all given a|b rules, sum the middle number of each list.

AoC 2024 Day 4: Gridnator

2024-12-04

Source: Day 4: Ceres Search

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a grid of letters, count how many times XMAS appears in any direction (horizontally, vertically, diagonally; forward or backward).

AoC 2024 Day 3: Mulinator

2024-12-03

Source: Day 3: Mull It Over

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given a string containing (among other gibberish) commands of the form mul({A}, {B}) where {A} and {B} are integers, calculate the sum of A*Bs.

AoC 2024 Day 2: Safinator

2024-12-02

Source: Day 2: Red-Nosed Reports

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Count how many given lists of numbers are safe:
Sorted (either ascending or descending)
Strictly increasing/decreasing (no duplicate values)
No increase/decrease is by more than 3

AoC 2024 Day 1: Sortinator

2024-12-01

Source: Day 1: Historian Hysteria

Full solution for today (spoilers!).

Part 1

Given two lists of numbers arranged in columns in a file, find the sum of differences (in sorted order).

Advent of Code 2024

2024-12-01

Let’s do this (Advent of Code) thing again!

I’m sticking with Rust again. I still use Python when I need to hammer out something quickly, but if I want to do something correctly (and especially if I want it to be fast), you can’t beat Rust.

Let’s see how it goes!

Full solutions will once again be posted to GitHub (including previous years and possibly some I haven’t written up yet): jpverkamp/advent-of-code

Ludum Dare(ish) 56: BugShine

2024-10-07

Ludum Dare? That’s been a while!

I didn’t actually enter the game jam. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything. But I had a bit of an idea and spent a few hours only on Sunday hammering something out:

Yeah, I did another cellular automata thing 😄

It’s not at all complete, but the basic idea is:

Generate a random level
See it with multiple players (colonies of bugs)
Each bug will send out waves of ‘shine’, expanding their territory
Take over the map to win

It’s sort of got that?

I’m using Rust as I’ve been doing a lot recently.

The main libraries are:

pixels for the rendering; it gives me direct access to a pixel buffer, which is my favorite
winit for windowing; this did require the feature rwh_05 to be properly compatible with pixels, which took a minute to track down

Other than, that, it’s straight custom code which you can see in it’s entirety on my github.

main.rs - creates the window and handles input
world.rs - runs the simulation mostly in an update function; with generation in new

I think that perhaps the only really interesting bit about the code is how the ‘shine waves’ work. Basically, I have a grid of the state of each cell, but I also have a Vec that tracks ‘active’ pixels. Those are the only ones that can update–which both helps performance and makes the simulation appear the way it does.

Overall, a nice quick project. More than anything, it actually convinced me to try setting up something that can render pixel buffers on Rust. And with a (very minimal) GUI, too! Both things I’ve been meaning to learn.

I probably won’t do anything more with this code, but it’s got the seeds of something more interesting. Keep an eye out. 😄

Onward!