> Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018
I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.
Re:Advent of Code 2019
by bhrgunatha on Monday December 02, 2019 @12:59AM
(#21680167)
The scatterlpots [1] of the time taken for the leaderboard (top 100) to finish part 1 (silver) and part 2 (gold) are a better indicator of difficulty.
I'd like to see a plot of average (median or mode) to finish each part but only the site has all that information.
Those box plots use horizontal jitter within individual boxes to better show overlapping points. That's a neat technique I haven't seen before.
The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems require advanced skills such as more sophisticated algorithms (graph theory, dynamic programming, etc.), reverse engineering, and careful debugging.
For what it's worth, I would expect anyone who knows what a loop is to be able to get the first half of today's problem without much difficulty. The second half is a bit less trivial but also pretty easy to understand.