Comment by ryandv

Comment by ryandv 3 days ago

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They... sort of are though? A year or two ago I just waited until the very last problem, which was min-cut. Anybody with a computer science education who has seen the prompt Proof. before should be able to tackle this one with some effort, guidance, and/or sufficient time. There are algorithms that don't even require all the high-falutin graph theory.

I don't mean to say my solution was good, nor was it performant in any way - it was not, I arrived at adjacency (linked) lists - but the problem is tractable to the well-equipped with sufficient headdesking.

Operative phrase being "a computer science education," as per GGP's point. Easy is relative. Let's not leave the bar on the floor, please, while LLMs are threatening to hoover up all the low hanging fruit.

byearthithatius 2 days ago

You say in your comment: "Anybody with a computer science education ... should be able to tackle this one" which is directly opposed to what they advertise: "You don't need a computer science background to participate"

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  • ryandv 2 days ago

    Do you understand the comment thread you are replying to?

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saberience 2 days ago

"Anybody with a computer science education who has seen the prompt Proof. before should be able to tackle this one with some effort, guidance, and/or sufficient time."

I have a computer science education and I have no idea what you're talking about. The prompt "Proof." ?

Most people who study Comp Sci never use any of what they learned ever again, and most will have forgotten most of what they learned within one or two years. Most software engineers never use any comp sci theory at all, but especially not graph theory or shit like Dijkstras algorithms, DFS, BFS etc.

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  • ryandv 2 days ago

    Holy fuck. I should just grow coconuts or something in the remote Philippines.

    > Most software engineers never use any comp sci theory at all, but especially not graph theory or shit like Dijkstras algorithms, DFS, BFS etc.

    But we are talking about Advent of Code here, which is a set of fairly contrived, theoretical, in vitro learning problems that you don't really see in the real software engineering world either.

    > The prompt "Proof." ?

    See this paper on the Stoer-Wagner min-cut algorithm from graph theory, for the last problem in a previous year's Advent of Code: https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~ac/Teach/CS105-Winter05/Handou...

    > I have a computer science education and I have no idea what you're talking about.

    A post-secondary computer science education? I don't mean bootcamp. I mean a course of study in mathematics.

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