I've never done AoC before. It seems like the success criteria is primarily about getting the correct answer, and secondarily about submitting a solution as quickly as possible if you want to be on the leaderboard. Is that right?
Is there any centralized place for seeing other people's solutions? I'd like to be able to learn from how others approach the problem, and what more elegant or performant solutions exist than the one I came up with.
A really cool thing about the subreddit is they archive all the megathreads so if you want to do the old advents you can still find some discussion / hints / …
Sadly not the various help or complaint threads, or the mad lads playing up the ante, but…
The the success criteria is whatever you want it to be.
* Learn a new language
* Practice a language you already know
* Try to solve things in a small number of lines
* Try to solve things where the solutions run as fast as possible
* ... any number of other personal goals
* Try to make the leaderboard
I've been solving the older years and learning rust in the process. I made it a secondary goal that all 49 solutions should be able to run in under 1s total. 2015 was easy, 2016 less so.
> secondarily about submitting a solution as quickly as possible if you want to be on the leaderboard. Is that right?
That's probably closer to #10, as it requires being available right as the problem drops (midnight EST and 6AM in europe, IIRC), and generally mid-cycle puzzles require being very good at solving these kinds of puzzles.
submitting as quickly as possible is very much not a success criteria. Each problem becomes available midnight EST so unless you're a competitive weirdo you won't even see the problem until the leaderboard is full.
Is there any centralized place for seeing other people's solutions? I'd like to be able to learn from how others approach the problem, and what more elegant or performant solutions exist than the one I came up with.