I enjoy puzzle games. I especially enjoy letting computers solve them for me 😄. Once upon a time, I set up a framework for solving random things. Let’s solve some more.

Today: A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build

It’s a Sokoban about making snowmen! You can push snowballs of three sizes around, collecting snow if you roll over it. You can push smaller snowballs onto bigger ones, stacking them. Or back off, in order to get around one another.

And that’s really it.

There are some interesting twists (multiple snowmen, the ability to leave and re-enter levels, and even a whole second ‘hard mode’), but at a basic level, it’s just pushing.

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Source: Blizzard Basin

Part 1

Given a map with a series of moving walls (that wrap when the hit the edges of the simulation), calculate the fastest route from the top left to the bottom right.

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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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