AoC# 2024 - Day 13: Claw Contraption

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 13 finds us in worship of the claw!

Part 1 ⭐️

Parsing the input into ClawMachine objects was as enjoyable as solving the first puzzle 🙂

Given the hint:

You estimate that each button would need to be pressed no more than 100 times to win a prize.

I was sure there was a better way than brute force looping from 0 to 100 for each button; recording the presses and token scores when a prize is won; and returning the smallest prize-winning number; but at ~100ms the brute force was sufficient if inneficient 🙃

Part 2 ⭐️

Unfortunately, it will take many more than 100 presses [to win the prize]

Moving the cheese prize so that brute force isn’t viable for Part 2 is a staple of these Advent of Code challenges 🙂

Not sure of a suitable approach to the problem, I explained today’s problem to Julie with the hope I might come up with an answer myself, but she also loves a challenge (especially a maths one) and within 10 minutes had written out a solution by hand. It didn’t take long to code it up and we had the second star¹.

After explaining the solution to me, I spent an hour learning how to solve simultaneous equations 🤓

1. Yes, I fully conceed that Julie won today’s second star ⭐️ ↩