this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Advent Of Code

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Ategon to c/advent_of_code
 

Day 5: If You Give a Seed a Fertilizer


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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I got far enough to realize that you probably needed to work backwards and given a location, determine the accompanying seed, and then check if that seed is one of the ones listed in the range. Still though, starting at 0 for location and working up was taking forever to find the first valid seed

Someone in this thread pointed out that if you picked the first value of each range in the map, working backwards from those points will get you a short list of seeds which map to low values. You then check if those seeds are valid, and also check the location of the first seeds in the range (the rest of the seeds in the range don't matter because those are covered by the first check). This ends up with about 200 locations which you can sort, to get the lowest value.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I tried brute forcing it but couldn't get the process to finish. Iterating through hundreds of millions of seeds is no bueno.

After reading your comment though I got the idea to map whole seed ranges instead of individual seeds. That finished in no time of course.