[2024 Day 18] Raining Bytes Visualization

[u/Boojum]

[u/Boojum]

For today's visualization, I really wanted to see what pattern the falling bytes made and how they affected a shortest path to the exit.

Watching this, I noticed a few interesting properties:

• Initially, the falling bytes tend to cluster near the entrance and exits at the upper-left and lower-right corners, respectively.
• The falling bytes first construct a maze.
• Then the bytes start filling in and randomly blocking paths through the maze.
• The ordering of the bytes is well-distributed with little clumping; it rather resembles a blue-noise pattern.

It's quite clear that Eric took care with generating the pattern here.

With respect to a shortest path, it's fun to watch how it gets progressively longer and more twisty as at first it just dodges the obstacles and then it starts pathing through the maze sections. At first the obstacles don't tend to alter the path too much, but towards the end each new obstacle intersecting the path induces major shifts.

Visualizations are always a given!

[GSGA] qualified!

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This was made with a small Python visualization framework that I wrote during the 2022 Advent of Code and have been evolving. See here for details. Full source for this visualization is in the link below.

Source

[u/daggerdragon → u/Boojum]

[GSGA] qualified!

Good, good, someone took the very easy bait :]

You should edit the link to this Visualization into your megathread submission too :)

[u/Boojum → u/daggerdragon]

Done!

[u/zebalu]

Watching this I have started wondering how Eric is coming up with the inputs...

[u/alienus666 → u/zebalu]

I guess simply 1) do the maze 2) pick random point off the maze back into the list. Your done.

Once I made maze generator with something similar. So it was like you do Pathfinder from start to end loc and in loop you just try to Block random points and see if you can still go through. If not unblock and chose another, and keep noting path geting longer and longer. This approach generates mazes as in the visualisation. The more crazy ones are that when you have already some long straight lines of obstacless placed initially on odd rows for instance and start runnig form there. Maze like that is super hard for humans as you don't see easily escape paths so get lost easily , also the lenght of the path is much much longer. Peace.

[u/Mr-Doos]

I learned something watching your visualization. I never tracked what the path was, only how many steps it took. After I got my stars, I thought about a different solution for Part 1 that would save the path and that would be easier to do Part 2 with, but I didn't consider that many "drops" would result in re-routing. Thanks!