AoC# 2024 - Day 22: Monkey Market

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 22 marks a Personal Best: 39⭐️’s and counting…

Part 1 ⭐️

Straightforward enough. Seeing that each step was followed by mix and prune operations, I created a MixAndPrune() function and was pleasantly surprised given the 2,000 iterations over the 1,730 input values that it ran in ~100ms.

Part 2 ❌

Again, this seemed straightforward enough to follow and implement, but after correctly solving the example puzzle input I couldn’t do the same for the actual puzzle input. The message says I’m close, but my approach took ~18min to compute (using the parallel extensions too) so there are two problems:

1. I’ve missed something in my implementation
2. There’s clearly a faster way to solve today’s Part 2