this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Advent Of Code
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C
Yay more grids! Seemed like prime Dijkstra or A* material but I went with an iterative approach instead!
I keep an array cost[y][x][dir], which is seeded at 1 for the starting location and direction. Then I keep going over the array, seeing if any valid move (step or turn) would yield to a lower best-known-cost for this state. It ends when a pass does not yield changes.
This leaves us with the best-known-costs for every reachable state in the array, including the end cell (bit we have to take the min() of the four directions).
Part 2 was interesting: I just happend to have written a dead end pruning function for part 1 and part 2 is, really, dead-end pruning for the cost map: remove any suboptimal step, keep doing so, and you end up with only the optimal steps. 'Suboptimal' here is a move that yields a higher total cost than the best-known-cost for that state.
It's fast enough too on my 2015 i5:
Code
Very interesting approach. Pruning deadends by spawning additional walls is a very clever idea.