@kimvanwyk I have been having so much fun with Advent Of Code 2025 (https://adventofcode.com/2025) -- thanks for putting me on to that!

I'm done with Day 10 (so 20 puzzles). I was able to solve 18 completely on my own. I only used AI for lookup-type questions, e.g. easiest way to create a list comprehension that takes stringA and turns it into a list of sets. (silly made up example, just to illustrate what I used AI for -- i.e. no help with the design of the solution itself, only language specific help, not puzzle logic help.)

Day 7 Part 2: After a couple of days of frustration, I had to peek at your solution in GitHub, and immediately grok-ed the approach you took and was able to manually replicate it.

Day 10 Part 2…. I hate to report… is the first one I eventually had to turn to ChatGPT to for the entire solution. It required higher order math-combination logic that I am not at all familiar with. I first wrote logic that was able to correctly brute force the example data, but the real data took the number of combinations to ridiculous levels -- well beyond my PC's reasonable abilities. So it required algorithms that I know NOTHING about. I am VERY impressed that ChatGPT was able to first give a brute force method when I gave it the example data, and when I gave it one line from the real data, it went “woah there buddy, that’s not possible with brute force, so let me give you a mathematical algorithmic way” and it then gave me a solution which worked first try, and solves the full problem in 2.5 seconds. Hate that I had to turn to AI, but there was no way I was going to solve that.

#advent_of_code #advent_of_code_2025 #adventofcode #adventofcode2025

Advent of Code - Day 11

Part 1 seemed straightforward enough, and it naively looked like Part 2 would be the same with a bit of filtering… but no! (Or maybe it would've been, if I could be bothered to let my code run for long enough.)

It's amazing how much faster things work with a bit of basic caching. 😅

#AdventOfCode #AdventOfCode2025 #Rust

Finished up Day 11 of Advent of Code and it was definitely easier than Day 10. Nothing fancy and it's pretty fast. Did have to think about how to get part 2 solved, but it was more an implementation issue more than me just smashing keys and hoping a solution fell out.

Solution: https://git.jamesthebard.net/jweatherly/advent-of-code/src/branch/main/2025/11/solution.py

#adventofcode2025 #adventofcode #python #programming

So, decided to keep on trucking on the Advent of Code problems. Day 10 was pain, but nothing a little bit of linear algebra couldn't fix after what can only be described as herculean searching on the web...thank you Scipy.

Solution: https://git.jamesthebard.net/jweatherly/advent-of-code/src/branch/main/2025/10/solution.py

#python #adventofcode #adventofcode2025

I finished day 6 part 2 of #aoc2025. While I initially tried parsing forward through the lines of input, I eventually moved to parsing right to left. And again used reduce() to get the results of the problems.

#AdventOfCode2025 #AdventofCode

Finished work for the year so it's time to finally look into #AdventOfCode2025!

I just completed "Secret Entrance" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

I had fun applying reduce() to lists to solve day 6 part 1 of #aoc2025. I learned about reduce() while porting machine learning code to Linux on IBM Power many years back, but I've seldom used it.

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I finished day 5 part 2 of #aoc2025. My first approach left me with overlapping ranges, so I had to revamp it. The working solution was much more elegant in addition to working!

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https://christopherhimes.com/blog/2025/12/15/advent-of-code-2025-day9

Day 9: Movie Theater

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