--- Day 15: Chiton ---

or..

I know what Chiton is because of Valheim...I did not know what A* was, though.

Part 1

Python

I started out trying to solve this like I solved the cave system, but the sample data took 22 seconds to run and return the correct data, which told me that the input, which is 100x100 vs the 10x10 sample, would never complete. When talking to my friend John about this over Discord, he said: "this sounds like A*" which I didn't know anything about.

I found a few articles that explained it but this one in particular did the best job explaining it, and after some stumbling I was able to implement it. I did implement a dict to track my coordinates rather than a class, though since it seemed easier for me to keep track of.

Go

Still catching up

Part 2

Python

It was surprisingly hard for me to wrap my brain around expanding the data source, but after I created a smaller set of data and worked on it in terminal for a bit, I created a fairly simple function to modify the input as required: implementing a function to handle the incrementing/rollover, then first expanding the data horizontally then vertically.

My part 1 A* algorithm took 22 seconds to navigate this 500 x 500 grid, but I'm not looking to fine tune it further at this point. I've had quite enough learning for one day thank you very much!

Go

We'll see.

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