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Deconstruct Advent of Code 2020
Essentials
Hdvent of code, I like the name, cool vibes. 2020 was my first year with AoC and the first time I participated in something like this.
For an absolute beginner, AoC would be an excellent choice, you can learn so much in a short time and get help with everything you want from very knowledgeable people. Also, more experienced people can learn one or two things here and there. This is my extended notes from AoC 2020 helping you becoming up to date with some basic math and programming stuff. Go is used in the examples.
Warm up
What do the puzzle solutions look like? To begin to find one’s feet I will start with a short overview of two puzzles.
Day 20
Let’s start by looking at what several people found was the trickiest puzzle in AoC 2020, day 20. It is time-consuming with all the steps needed but not hard and actually if you know what a jigsaw puzzle is this one is pretty easy.
With all the flipping and rotating of tiles using a library that handles matrices is your best friend. Maybe you know NumPy for Python. For Go Gonum is a good bet. It doesn’t have all the functionality of NumPy has but it is still useful. Here is an overview of the solution.
