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 2017 Day 9: Garbage Gobbler

2017-12-09

Source: Stream Processing

Part 1: An input stream can contain:

  • groups are delimited by { and }, groups are nestable and may contain garbage or data (objects within a group are comma delimited)
  • garbage is delimited by < and >, groups cannot be nested within garbage, a ! within garbage is an escape character: !> does not end a garbage segment

The score of a single group is equal to how many times it is nested (the innermost group of {{{}}} has score 3).

The score of a stream is the sum of the scores of all groups in that stream.

What is the total score of your input?

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AoC 2017 Day 7: Tree

2017-12-07

Source: Recursive Circus

Part 1: A tree is defined as such:

  • node (weight) -> child1, child2, ...
  • node (weight)

Where a node always has a weight, but may or may not have child nodes.

What is the name of the root node of the tree (the node without a parent)?

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AoC 2017 Day 6: Tightrope

2017-12-06

Source: Memory Reallocation

Part 1: Start with n stacks of different sizes. Take the largest block and distribute its items starting with n+1 and looping around. How many iterations of this does it take before you see a state you’ve seen before?

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AoC 2017: Library Functions

2017-12-01

As mentioned in the main post, I’m structuring my solutions a bit differently this year. Rather than repeating the same relatively lengthy header in each function, we’re going to have a few shared files that can be imported or used for every problem.

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