<Advent of Code 2024 day 14> (no spoilers) :thread...

# advent-of-code

[Advent of Code 2023 day 14]

Advent of Code 2024 day 14 (no spoilers) 🧵

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

It would be really helpful if there was an example of what part 2 was asking

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

Part 1 is straightforward, then part 2 is guess what I mean. There are 500 robots.

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

Alright I don’t want to guess what he means here so I’m going to stop at part 1 for now

[Jonathan Kolberg]

Part 2, I'm not sure how the picture should look like, so what is the figure?

[Jan Durovec]

I should probably reply to spoilers thread instead, right?

[Jonathan Kolberg]

Not sure if the image of what is expected is already a spoiler. But if you do not consider it a spoiler, there is an image available on reddit.

[Jan Durovec]

replied in spoilers... just in case

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

OK I’m glad I looked there

[Anirudh]

yeah, very ambiguous Part 2. what is "most"? and what shape is that thing he said? is it supposed to be a triangle? if so, what kind?

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

The challenge is entirely "figure out what is meant by this"

[Anirudh]

I went through the Spoiler thread. I would NEVER have guessed that that's what Mr. Wastl wanted. disgusting.

I mean, I would have just printed them all out and then started visually looking for a pattern. but seriously, what was he thinking?!

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

I did not feel bad for looking at the spoiler as soon as I did it

[Charles Flynn]

I'm tempted to just guess some answers on the site, play hi lo a little bit, and once I've narrowed it down just print in that range and find it.

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

Give in to that temptation

[nerses]

Any hints, that could help, without looking at the printout? I am thinking of it’s gonna be 🎄 the top row should have robots only in the center. The row below will have robots on bots sides of the center and possibly in the center of the tree is filled in. Thinking how to find the seconds for the top row situation with math rather than brute forcing

[Anirudh]

> Any hints, that could help, without looking at the printout?
there is a shortcut "thing to look for" but it's a spoiler. so not in this thread

[Dan Fingal-Surma]

yeah somewhat hard to give hints without telling you how to solve it. I would say that “Christmas tree” is a fairly underspecified shape mathematically.

[Charles Flynn]

I'm thinking maybe you could do something like search for a 5x5 diagonal and only print ones that do that to see it it's your answer.

[Charles Flynn]

Like scan it for a ^ shape

[Anirudh]

yeah, that's a nice idea, that should work.
(I've already done it, so won't spoil it for you. I didn't know what a 5x5 diagonal was)

[Luan Tran]

I don't know if it is a spoilers, but a hint is that many of us in the spoilers section didn't try to find the shape at all but through some other methods.