Deterministic Shuffling Using Hashes

2017-12-11

Whenever I create my yearly reading list, I need a way to order the books. Sure, I could just shuffle them normally, but that leads me to the temptation of cheating and re-shuffling them so that the books I want to read most are first. What I really need is a shuffle that will shuffle the same way every time.

Enter: hashsort

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AoC 2017 Day 10: Knot Cool

2017-12-10

Source: Knot Hash

Part 1: Starting with a list of the numbers from 1 to n and a list of lengths (as input):

  1. Initialize current_position and skip_size to 0
  2. For each length element in the lengths list:
  3. Reverse the first length elements of the list (starting at current_position)
  4. Move forward by length plus skip_size
  5. Increment skip_size by 1

After applying the above algorithm, what is the product of the first two elements in the list (from the original first position, not the current_position)?

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AoC 2016 Day 17: Md5 Maze

2016-12-17

Source: Two Steps Forward

Part 1: Create a 4x4 grid of rooms with doors Up, Down, Left, and Right from each location. To determine if a door is currently open:

  • Calculate MD5(salt + sequence) where sequence is a string containing any combination of UDLR depending on how you got to this room
  • The first four hex values represent the doors Up, Down, Left, and Right respectively: bcdef means open; anything else is closed

Find the shortest path from (0, 0) to (3, 3).

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AoC 2016 Day 14: Bad One Time Pads

2016-12-14

Source: One-Time Pad

Part 1: Calculate a series of MD5 hashes (the same as Day 5). A hash is considered valid if it contains a triple (three characters in a row) and somewhere in the next 1000 hashes there is a quintuple of that same character.

What index produces the 64th key?

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