Advent of Code 2023 Day 11 (BaseA Style)

[AlteryxCommunityTeam]

Discussion thread for day 11 of the Advent of Code - https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/11

[Gem]

A nice, tiny break from making iterative macros! 

In other news, my efforts/desire to limit the number of tools I slap on the canvas is going the same way as my efforts to reduce the number of cookies I'm consuming this season: not particularly well. I'll pick up on both of these things in the new year 😅

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[DaisukeTsuchiya]

I post again with solution in yxzp.

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[SeanAdams]

Hello Manhattan distance my old friend!

This runs in a few seconds on my machine - so I didn't spend too much time optimizing

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Solution:

A few things help here:

1. You only need to keep the galaxies – the # characters – the empty space can be discarded as long as you know the address of the galaxy
2. By knowing which columns (or Rows) are empty – you can just shuffle everything along
3. To measure the distance between galaxies – just use Manhattan distance

I was a bit lazy – and built 2 macros for the bulk-out, one to move rows, and one to move columns – but it was less brain tax.

The prep macro is a little more complex – it splits out rows; columns to make downstream processing easier

• The G output is the normal row/col format grid but only for galaxies
• The R output is blank rows
• The C output is blank columns
• And the M output is all cells unaltered for debugging

The Bulk-out macros:

I suspect I could have done this better – but this goes through each row which is empty from the largest to the smallest, and shuffles them downwards.    This way you can iterate from the end.    If I had spent more time on this – there is probably a non-iterative solution, but this runs lightning quick already.

[estherb47]

Very much enjoyed this challenge. In years past, the "shortest distance" challenges didn't make sense. This one did, and I'm thrilled that my part 2 runs in .3 seconds!

Straight math, no macros, no spatial. I do wonder if you could spatially match points to a line, maybe with a buffer or trade area, and count the number of points to take a spatial approach. Don't have the energy to poke through workflows to see.

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Using the test data, my initial approach of using the full number, e.g., 100 as the number to add, was slightly high. Decided to subtract one, and it worked. I chalk this up to a lucky guess.

[Laurap1228]

Here is my Day 11 solution

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