I had a similar feeling with that one, found the corners by counting edges on part one, and really got de-motivated for part two and actually solving the puzzle and looking for the patterns

Interesting he thought it was tedious - I thought this one was actually the closest to being like a real world software engineering task! No mathematical tricks or lateral thinking, just a gnarly problem that requires planning and breaking down into more manageable pieces. I actually really enjoyed it for that.

Full quote

> Family holiday preparations kept me from doing Part 2 on the night it was released, and unfortunately I didn't feel like coming back to it later: it seemed too tedious for too little reward. I thought it was inelegant that a solid block of # pixels would be considered a sea monster with waves.

Phew - I'm not alone.

My computers are full of half finished projects if that makes you feel better. :)

Mine too, I even have a few Flash (.fla) project files (games) here coming through an array of backups

That one was tedious though. It's easy to see what the solution is, but it just takes a lot of time to write it up.

I punted on part 2 of #20 as well, but came back to it the next day with a reasonable idea. Some of the tedious parts are easier to do by hand, like picking the corner of the map to start with on #20, or solving the uniqueness on #21.

I'm still looking forward to reviewing how Norvig did most of the problems.

How do people usually tackle AdventOfCode? Most elegant/concise solution or best performant?

Asking because for example most solutions to Day 1 I've seen are O(n^2)

I aim for "first thing that I can get to work and doesn't take more than 20 seconds". Usually they run in under 2 (Common Lisp is my language of choice). Then for the part 2 portions I may have to optimize.

I sometimes go back and clean up my solutions, though I aim for a combination of clarity and performance if I do that, clarity first.

Unless I'm really unhappy with my solution, I stick with the first thing I write that spits out the correct answer. Since a lot of the problems require you to do some potentially interesting optimization to get an answer in a reasonable amount of time, I don't bother optimizing the ones that don't.

> Do I sense a hit of frustration in his comment? ;)

Yeah, I too smiled at his comment last week.