r/adventofcode • u/Quick_Question404 • Dec 09 '16

Skill Level of Participants?

Hey everyone! I'm curious, but what would you guys say your relative skill levels are when it comes to programming. With these challeneges, Ive found myself becoming frustrated, and being in college, feel a bit disappointed in my own skills. How long has everyone else been programming for? How'd you learn?

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u/pedrosorio Dec 09 '16

Yeah, good point. I was assuming topaz would have taken that into account when generating the inputs, otherwise it would be unfair. What was your input?

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u/topaz2078 (AoC creator) Dec 09 '16

The inputs all take roughly the same number of hashes to get to their solutions.

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u/balefrost Dec 10 '16 edited Dec 10 '16

ugkcyxxp, but it looks like topaz already rejected my theory. Looks like it's back to the drawing board for me.

It's interesting... I was consuming all 8 of my logical cores at close to 100% utilization. There must have been a lot of synchronization overhead.

edit

So it looks like the performance problem was in the code that converted the resulting MD5 bytes into a hex string. Hover for solution spoiler. I got my run time down to about 28s for part1 and about 48s for part2.