Finished Advent of Code 2019
This morning I finally finished Advent of Code 2019. Most days weren't too bad - I think the ones that really caused me to work extra were Day 18 and Day 20 - both of which were the pathing problems that I had failed to really master in years past. Good or bad, I decided not to give up on these, and figured out how to solve these this year.
Dijkstra's Algorithm is interesting, but I really didn't see how to implement it in Clojure until I was walking home one day - and it hit me: the recursion really made it all so much easier. And that really helped me as I hammered on these problems this year to really get a solid understanding of how to work with Dijkstra's. I'm very glad I stuck with this.
Then when I had that understood, I ran into Day 20 where it wasn't the right approach, but I needed to understand a simple Breadth-First Search on the maze. This is much different than Dijkstra's in that it's a simple looping construct, and only finds the one shortest path - but that's OK... that's all that was asked for. But it's fast. Very.
I'm really glad that this year I didn't stop when the problems seemed to be too tough for me. I'm a better coder because of the new knowledge. 🙂