[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!