Day 22: Sand

Megathread guidelines

  • Keep top level comments as only solutions, if you want to say something other than a solution put it in a new post. (replies to comments can be whatever)
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FAQ

  • cacheson@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    Nim

    I sorted the bricks by their lower Z coordinate, then tried to move each of them downward, doing collision checks against all the others along the way. Once a level with collisions was found, I recorded each colliding brick as a supporter of the falling brick.

    For part 1, I made another table of which other bricks each brick was supporting. Any bricks that weren’t the sole support for any other bricks were counted as safe to disintegrate.

    For part 2, I sorted the bricks again after applying gravity. For each brick, I included it in a set of bricks that would fall if it were removed, then checked the others further down the list to see if they had any non-falling supporters. Those that didn’t would be added to the falling set.

    Initially I was getting an answer for part 2 that was too high. I turned out that I was counting bricks that were on the ground as being unsupported, so some of them were getting included in the falling sets for their neighbors. Adding a z-level check fixed this.

    Both of these have room for optimization, but non-debug builds run 0.5s and 1.0s respectively, so I didn’t feel the need to write an octree implementation or anything.