Day 11: Plutonian Pebbles
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FAQ
- What is this?: Here is a post with a large amount of details: https://programming.dev/post/6637268
- Where do I participate?: https://adventofcode.com/
- Is there a leaderboard for the community?: We have a programming.dev leaderboard with the info on how to join in this post: https://programming.dev/post/6631465
C
Started out a bit sad that this problem really seemed to call for hash tables - either for storing counts for an iterative approach, or to memoize a recursive one.
Worried that the iterative approach would have me doing problematic O(n^2) array scans I went with recursion and a plan to memoize only the first N integers in a flat array, expecting low integers to be much more frequent (and dense) than higher ones.
After making an embarrassing amount of mistakes it worked out beautifully with N=1m (testing revealed that to be about optimal). Also applied some tail recursion shortcuts where possible.
Code
https://github.com/sjmulder/aoc/blob/master/2024/c/day11.c