↳ In-reply-to » How did so many get the first star within the first 3 mins? Media

@xuu@txt.sour.is I ask myself that question every year. 🤣

To be fair, the first part wasn’t really that difficult. If you have A LOT of experience with these kind of problems/puzzles and if you have a proper framework, I imagine it’s doable. (I, on the other hand, spent about 40 minutes just writing my C code to parse the input.)

Some of these people record themselves and then post it on YouTube. It’s pretty crazy to watch. 🥴

The second part of the puzzle, was/is pretty hard, though. At least for me, because I haven’t found “the trick” yet. I’m currently trying to brute-force it while having breakfast. 😅 (But given that it took ~8 minutes for the first person to get both stars, maybe they brute-forced it as well. With a faster machine and multithreading, ~8 minutes sounds about right. Brute-force is rarely the answer in AoC, though.)