My solution today is an Elixir script that allows you to play the adventure game interactively.

I added some translation of the input commands, so that you can type “n” instead of “north” and “get” instead of take, and so on.

I also unintentionally added a cheat mode. If you pick up a lethal item (such as an infinite loop), the dying message will be printed, but you can continue to play.

I solved the problem by playing the adventure game manually. If I’ll get really bored during the rest of my Christmas vacations, I might implement an automatic solver.

Comparing this year’s Advent of Code to last year’s, this year had one puzzle that was much harder than anything last year. Overall I liked this year’s puzzle better than last year’s. There was less of finicky parsing and complex rules.

Merry Christmas!

For part 25 I made a simple interactive runner, and then solved the game manually. I’m not particularly interested in building the autosolver.

In general, I enjoyed the first half of this edition, but didn’t like most of the more demanding challenges in the second half. I found they were challenging me in a way I was less interested in (like “spot the special input” solution on day 16, manual boolean reduction on day 21, or math problem on day 22). I also didn’t really enjoy solving puzzles which were not particularly challenging but were finicky (e.g. day 20, or day 24).

I quite enjoyed comparing solutions with y’all, and I think this was for me the best thing about AoC this year. Thanks everyone, and have a happy holidays!

I did this by hand, so nothing great to share. But I did it decently fast and got 26 for pt2.