This one was a doozy and took far more time than I'd like to admit. I hope it's the hardest problem of the year. My original solution gave correct answers, but took on the order of 3+ minutes to run, even with memoization (it wasn't finishing any time soon without it). I then tried dropping in some A* and Dijkstra libraries, but wasn't really happy with how things were progressing with them. Some research pointed me toward double-ended queues and priority queues as better solutions, which I should have come up with my own since they've been used along with memoization in other AoC's, and dropping those in took the runtimes down to 4-15 seconds on my m1 macbook air. Once I swapped out the memoized data structures from arrays to maps, the runtime finally dropped to a much more palatable 50-180 millisecond range.
I'm always suspicious when my solution is hundreds of lines of code, though, since you tend to see much more terse solutions from others in the AoC subreddit, but I attribute at least some of the bloat to "Go things" like how maps and arrays usually need to be "make"d first, how there's no easy "list comprehension" or "linq" style data structure queries, etc.
Finally: note that I've seen _dramatically_ different runtimes based on the input. One set of input I checked against ran in 30ms/10ms while another ran in 180ms/54ms. I guess it's never been promised that all inputs are created equally...
My initial idea for a solution ended up working out great, but I had a hard time getting it all down on "paper," so to speak, so this is probably 200 lines of code too many, but it definitely does exactly what I envisioned (and quickly) even if it's not the most succinct.
This was incredibly cool and I had a really fun time with it. Uncomment the draw and sleep in Part2 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.
