Source: Unstable Diffusion

Part 1

Implement a cellular automaton with the following rules:

• If you have no neighbors, don’t move (important, I forgot this one for a while)
• Otherwise:
  • Calculate a potential move:
    • If you have no neighbors to the north, move north
    • If not, check likewise for south, then west, than east
  • If no other agent is moving to the same space, move to your potential move
  • Otherwise, don’t move
• On each frame, rotate the order the directions are checked in (NSWE, SWEN, WENS, ENSW, NSWE, …)

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Source: Not Enough Minerals

Part 1

Given a series of given a series of blueprints, each of which gives instructions for how to build a single robot from a collection of materials that in turn will produce one of a given material per turn, determine the best order of builds to maximize your geode (the most valuable material) production for each blueprint given a time limit of 24 minutes.

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Source: Proboscidea Volcanium

Part 1

Given a graph of nodes, some of which have a pressure (per tick output value) and an agent that can move through the graph and activate specific nodes (so that they output their per tick value every future tick), what is the maximum total output possible in 30 steps?

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Source: Beacon Exclusion Zone

Part 1

There are a collections of Sensors and Beacons. As input, you are given the Beacon closest to each Sensor (using Manhattan Distance). If a Beacon is not closest to any sensor, it will not appear in this list. Calculate how many points in the given row (y=2000000) cannot contain a Beacon.

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Source: Regolith Reservoir

Part 1

Given a series of walls as input, run a falling sand simulation until any new sand falls of the map. Count how many grains of sand we end up with.

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Source: Hill Climbing Algorithm

Part 1

Given a height map, find the shortest path between two points such that the path can descend any distance but can only climb by a maximum of 1.

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Source: Treetop Tree House

Part 1

Given a grid of numbers, count how many of these numbers have a direct path in any cardinal direction to the edge of the grid.

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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

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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!

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Snakebird!

A cute little puzzle game, where you move around snake(birds). Move any number of snakes around the level, eating fruit, and getting to the exit. The main gotchas are that you have gravity to content with–your snake will easily fall off the edge of the world–and each time you eat a fruit, your snake gets bigger. This can help get longer to get into hard to reach places or it can cause trouble when you trap yourself in corners.

Let’s use the new immutable.js solver to solve these problems!

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