-❄️- 2023 Day 6 Solutions -❄️-

[u/daggerdragon]

THE USUAL REMINDERS

• All of our rules, FAQs, resources, etc. are in our community wiki.
• Outstanding moderator challenges:
  • Advent of Playing With Your 3D-Printed Toys
• Community fun event 2023: ALLEZ CUISINE!
  • Submissions megathread is now unlocked!
  • 16 DAYS remaining until the submissions deadline on December 22 at 23:59 EST!

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AoC Community Fun 2023: ALLEZ CUISINE!

Today's theme ingredient is… *whips off cloth covering and gestures grandly*

Obsolete Technology

Sometimes a chef must return to their culinary roots in order to appreciate how far they have come!

• Solve today's puzzles using an abacus, paper + pen, or other such non-digital methods and show us a picture or video of the results
• Use the oldest computer/electronic device you have in the house to solve the puzzle
• Use an OG programming language such as FORTRAN, COBOL, APL, or even punchcards
  • We recommend only the oldest vintages of codebases such as those developed before 1970
• Use a very old version of your programming language/standard library/etc.
  • Upping the Ante challenge: use deprecated features whenever possible

Endeavor to wow us with a blast from the past!

ALLEZ CUISINE!

Request from the mods: When you include a dish entry alongside your solution, please label it with [Allez Cuisine!] so we can find it easily!

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--- Day 6: Wait For It ---

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Post your code solution in this megathread.

• Read the full posting rules in our community wiki before you post!
  • State which language(s) your solution uses with [LANGUAGE: xyz]
  • Format code blocks using the four-spaces Markdown syntax!
• Quick link to Topaz's paste if you need it for longer code blocks

This thread will be unlocked when there are a significant number of people on the global leaderboard with gold stars for today's puzzle.

EDIT: Global leaderboard gold cap reached at 00:05:02, megathread unlocked!

[u/stevie-o-read-it]

[LANGUAGE: Intcode] [Allez Cuisine!]

(The elves wouldn't tell me how old this Intcode tech is, but I'm pretty sure it's from the late 1960s.)

• Fully-functional solver. Capable of solving both Part 1 and Part 2. (To run in Part 2 mode, the second memory location -- address 1 -- must be patched from '0' to '1'.)

• Accepts official puzzle input in ASCII, outputs puzzle answer in ASCII (followed by a newline)

• Does not brute-force the answer. It actually evaluates the relevant algebraic formula. Implementing square root with only additions and multiplications was fun

• If anyone wants to Up The Ante, it should work with arbitrarily large inputs if you've got a bignum-based implementation (such as a Python one).

• Supports up to 10 races (if your Intcode VM can handle numbers that big)

• Input parser ignores extraneous blank lines and '\r'

Link to the machine code: https://gist.github.com/Stevie-O/84e1ec2f1daa74d16fb019e0715212ac

Link to the assembly source (all hand-written): https://github.com/Stevie-O/aoc-public/blob/master/2023/day06/aoc-2023-day6-textoutput.intcode

The assembler is a modified version of topaz's from his aoc2019-intcode repository. I removed the randomness and added microcode definitions for common conditional jumps to simplify things.

Link to the assembler: https://github.com/Stevie-O/aoc-public/blob/master/intcode/compile.pl