--- Day 14: Extended Polymerization ---

or..

To infinity and beyond (the limits of my computers RAM)

Part 1

Python

I brute forced this by creating a string. Not a great or sustainable method, but it was quick.

Go

Still catching up

Part 2

Python

This required me to think like the Lanternfish puzzle: you don't care about individuals, you care about what is happening to individuals.

I ended up creating a dict to track how many of each "pair" of letters existed each day, and used that to "grow" the new 2 pairs from each the next day. This worked very well, but then took me a bit to figure out the logic to calculate the count of individual letters because everything repeats twice in the dict except the very first and last character. Then I realized those never change because we're inserting into the middle and that's a bingo.

Go

We'll see.

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