this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
AoC 2024
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console.log('Hello World')
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Hey - I've a question about this. Why is it correct? (Or is it?)
If you have two maps for positions in the maze that give (distance to end) and (distance from start), then you can select for points p1, p2 such that
d(p1, p2) + distance-to-end(p1) + distance-to-start(p2) <= best - 100
however, your version seems to assume that distance-to-end(p) = best - distance-to-start(p) - surely this isn't always the case?
There is exactly one path without cheating, so yes, the distance to one end is always the total distance minus the distance to the other end.
Gotcha, thanks. I just re-read the problem statement and looked at the input and my input has the strongest possible version of that constraint: the path is unbranching and has start and end at the extremes. Thank-you!
I missed that line too:
So I also did my pathfinding for every variation in the first part, but realised something must be wrong with my approach when I saw part 2.
(I ask because everyone's solution seems to make the same assumption - that is, that you're finding a shortcut onto the same path, as opposed to onto a different path.)
Some others have answered already, but yes, there was a well-hidden line in the problem description about the map having only a single path from start to end..