The last remaining bit is to scan the instructions array for groups of consecutive entries. My current plan is to start with probably 4 instructions and scan forward for the same consecutive set occurring again; if the count of other occurrences ever dips below 3, drop the most recently added set of 2 and pull the remaining entries into program A. Then repeat for programs B and C, and check that the list of instructions is now empty. Finally, compare each chunk successively to the full string of instructions to produce some combination of A,B,Cs to satisfy the requirements, and feed all that into the program's inputs.
This was incredibly cool and I had a really fun time with it. Uncomment everything to see the game play itself! Note that I'm not seeking around in the terminal window to make the drawing smooth, I'm just outputting each new frame as it happens, so there's some jitter, but it still looks great!
I messed around a bit with control codes to move the cursor around instead of the "draw the buffer over and over again" approach, and they work, mostly, but I'm sticking with this for now.
This one was an absolute beating for me. I am so bad at these sorts of problems. Ultimately I settled on a probably-not-ideal solution that crawls the graph with offsets of each variant of (+/-x,+/-y), marking nodes visited as we come across them so that we end up with a list of asteroids that we can see. Given that this is day 10, and knowing how bad I am at math, I'm assuming this is very far from the intended solution, but it works reasonably quickly and I managed to come up with it myself, so I'm not going to stress too much about it.
For asteroid destruction, the best method I could come up with for finding the correct order was to implement an entire Vector class and sort by angle, which worked, but again, I can't decide if it was the intended solution or not. I should start reusing past years' codebases so I don't have to keep building a utility library from scratch.
