this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
1100 points (95.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
32482 readers
196 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Advent of code 2023 day 24 part 2. Z3 solver saved the day on that one.
Now I have PTSD every time I see an hailstorm.
So many solver solutions that day, either Z3 or Gauss-Jordan lol. I got a little obsessed about doing it without solvers or (god forbid) manually solving the system and eventually found a relatively simple way to find the intersection with just lines and planes:
It's a suboptimal solution in that it uses 4 hailstones instead of the theoretical minimum of 3, but was a lot easier to wrap my head around. Incidentally, it is not too hard to adapt the above algorithm to not need C (i.e., to use only 3 hailstones) by using line intersections. Such a solution is not much more complicated than what I gave and still has a simple geometric interpretation, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :)
That is a great explanation of how you solved it, thanks! I should go back to it and conquer that puzzle properly without a solver. Or at least try.