Today’s puzzle is called ‘Ticket Translation’. We have a bunch of fields in a language we do not understand and we need to figure out which is which. There’s a set of rules we collected in several ways to a document that will serve as the puzzle input. If you want to follow along please download AdventOfCode2020.pbit and check Day 1 post for instructions. Part 1 Our input file is divided into three sections separated by a blank line: ...
Rambunctious Recitation is number game that follows the rules of the Van Eck sequence. Here’s a great video from the Numberphile channel on YouTube about it. And here start our troubles because it seems no one has yet found an efficient algorithm for generating this sequence. We will really need to brute force it. How can we resolve this predicament with the tools available to us? If you want to follow along please download AdventOfCode2020.pbit and check Day 1 post for instructions. ...
The troubles are far from over, this time it’s the docking program on the ferry that’s not compatible with the port computer system. We need to emulate the port’s software by using a bitmasking system to figure out the correct instructions. Let’s see if we are able to implement this logic with Power BI. If you want to follow along please download AdventOfCode2020.pbit and check Day 1 post for instructions. Part 1 As usual there’s a file with a set of instructions. Some lines refer to memory addresses and others to bitmasks. We need to apply the mask to the values stored in the memory addresses beneath it until we reach the next mask repeating the process to the end of the file. ...
We arrived to the island after the ferry trip and we see ourselves in need of transportation to the nearest airport. Fortunately there’s a shuttle bus service between the sea port and the airport that could take us there. Day 13 is a wonderful mathematical puzzle, following the theme of modular arithmetic of the previous one. Let’s dive into it as there some surprises with the numeric limits on Power BI. ...
After the waiting room we are at a ferry navigating to the island. There seems to be a problem with the navigation system, and we volunteered to help. We have a set of instructions and we need to make some sense of them to help the captain circumvent the storm. The solution to the problem will be given by calculating the Manhattan distance (sum of the absolute values of its east/west position and its north/south position). ...
Today’s puzzle title is “Seating System” but it’s actually a variation of a well known zero-player game called Conway’s Game of Life. Many of us may recall this game as a popular choice for work assignments in computer science courses. Dr. John Conway, the English mathematician who created this game was last year a victim of COVID-19. If you want to know a little more about him you can read this article that was featured this week on Hacker News. ...
Day 10 puzzle brings us an array of adapters. In the first part we will need to find the number of differences of 1 and 3 jolts. Part two asks us to find the total number of distinct ways in which we can arranje the adapters to connect the device to the charging outlet. If you want to follow along please download AdventOfCode2020.pbit and check Day 1 post for instructions. Part 1 After reading that long text, we can see in the example given that all we have to do is: ...
This puzzle looks a lot like day 1. We have a list of numbers and need to do some operations that will return some big numbers. Let’s try to DAX out them. If you want to follow along please download AdventOfCode2020.pbit and check Day 1 post for instructions. Part 1 We have a list of numbers of each the first 25 are a preamble. After this, any number can be calculated as a sum of any pair of numbers in that interval. ...
In day 8 we find a some weird infinite loop on a handheld device. To fix this problem we are asked to create a program that goes trough a stack of instructions. nop +0 acc +1 jmp +4 acc +3 jmp -3 acc -99 acc +1 jmp -4 acc +6 And after we find where the infinite loop is located we replace the bad command with the correct instruction. ...
Day 7: Handy Haversacks is the hardest puzzle to solve using only Power BI until now. It took me a lot of time to find a viable and fast solution. I have first tried to solve this using DAX PATH but had issues with the different levels of recursion. It was possible in the real data input for the same bag to be child of different bags in different levels. Only after a deep dive on using the List.Generate a light began to appear on the end of the tunnel. ...