this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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Advent Of Code

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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!

Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

Everybody Codes is another collection of programming puzzles with seasonal events.

EC 2025

AoC 2025

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Everyone loves a good visualisation, share any visualisations that you have created here.

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[–] strlcpy 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

In 16-bit real mode assembly, as a hybrid DOS .COM program and BIOS-bootable disk image. With bonus palette animations! I had the hybrid thing going on before (see the repo), but this is the first time getting something animated.

Repo | day07.com (12 KB) | full video

video

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's awesome, is it just random paths?

[–] strlcpy 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well it uses the input of course but I found that if you make it truly random, the lines mostly go down in a straight line, all bunching up in the middle, which isn't very pleasing. So now the beams have a "current direction" which has a 25% of flipping at every splitter

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I used a u8, one bit per level to do mine, but because not all bits correspond to a splitter, it ends up duplicating a lot of the paths. Which is why I made the lowest bit at the top, so it flip-flops a lot, giving the appearance of multiple different paths :D

[–] strlcpy 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

If I understand correctly, your visualization shows up to to 256 unique paths then?

In this one, every time the beam passes a splitter, the other side is put on a queue, so eventually all possible paths are traced, breadth first. Initially I worked through the options recursively, but that depth-first filling out was boring to look at.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, max of 256 paths, and if there were no holes in the splitter layout, it would be the full 256. Also why i had to limit the depth to 16 layers, more than that and the brute forcing gets a bit silly.

[–] mykl@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

If took more code to animate this than it did to solve the problem...

Looks very nice for the test data:

And...okay...for the live data:

[–] strlcpy@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I like the coloring, really cool!

[–] mykl@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks, 'Tis the season.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] mykl@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

That certainly doesn't reflect my mood today.

[–] hades@programming.dev 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thats cool! What are the colours meant to signify?

[–] hades@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago

Christmas, I guess :) (I just pick a random colour each time a roll is removed)

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Day 7 - Colourised, single image.

[–] hades@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago

Its all a blur...

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago

Video of each path (for the short example, dont think i can do the long one) https://youtube.com/shorts/jLpiUOSIiNw

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)
[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Colorised, but filling in from least photons to most: https://youtube.com/shorts/McM1yIn5UCw

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

Showing the of it filling in a bit clearer (or less clearer, i dunno): https://youtube.com/shorts/dBYAdRyhCLU

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] hades@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Apart from day 4 not much to visualise so far this year :/

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah, Im hoping it picks up. No mazes yet :(

[–] hades@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Day 7 (zoom to full screen): https://lgbt.earth/i/web/post/903381501524320591

I can probably improve this a lot, but I was afraid I'll be too lazy after getting this far, so posting as is. Still, lmk if you have any suggestions :)

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Day 8: https://youtu.be/QiezRG4jiUM

Getting pretty close to having written my own game renderer, only slower and worse :D

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

https://youtube.com/shorts/5V9vdWtuRAQ <- Rotation, super proud of this one

[–] mykl@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Squeezing all spaces out of the grid (and plotting at right-angles to the other visualisation here) gives this evil shape, which will doubtless haunt my dreams tonight.

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Apparently this is ~~wrong. Not sure what I'm missing here.~~ correct, my code was borked I guess (maybe an overflow or something?).

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

First time I've seen a visualisation before solve :D

I took one look at pt2 and noped out, its a later problem I think...

[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Correction, turns out doing it entirely in Excel was the answer for me. The points I found were correct, but the area calculation in my code was wrong.

I had to visualize it before I could even attempt to solve it. Still did it mostly intuitively based on the visualization.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 2 weeks ago

Ha, love an excel solution, please do share it in the solutions thread!