Advent of Code

Yesterday, I started solving a series of small programming puzzles in Advent of Code. You get one puzzle per day, as a proper advent calendar. So far, each puzzle is divided in two parts, granting a maximum of two stars per puzzle. The two parts of a puzzle use the same input and the second part is usually a simple variation of the first one. You only have to submit the output to the provided puzzles, so it’s possible to do things by hand, albeit unlikely. The puzzles so far have been simple, either by definition, or by having small input sizes, thus not requiring efficient algorithms to be solved. The tree lights up as you go along, giving it a nice effect:

I’ve decided to solve them all in Scala. Initially I started in C++, but in day 4’s puzzle it was required to find MD5 hashes and I decided to leverage Java and Scala’s standard library to ease up the process, sticking with it for the rest of the puzzles (so far).