AoC# 2024 - Day 6: Guard Gallivant

It’s Advent of Code time 🎄

Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

Day 6 - oh yes, I love a maze!

Part 1 ⭐️

Pretty straightforward 🙂

Part 2 ⭐️

Seemed straightforward, but after a wrong answer and much code review I was struggling to understand why my approach to adding obstacles wasn’t working. I’d thought I could place an ostacle in the path then run from there, but my answer was too high.

I’m not loving mazes anymore.

I ruminated on it during the day and after discussing the problem with Julie, she suggested building a new map with each of the visited points as an obstacle and running each to completion. A quick rewrite after completing day 7 and we’re back up to full marks 🙌

Out of curiosity, I used the Parallel.ForEach(visited, visitedPoint => {}) function, and it took 37.7652257 seconds to complete.