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I completed the whole thing last year; the problems start out very easy, but get dramatically more challenging over the course of the month. Check out the stati
by teraflop 7y ago
I completed the whole thing last year; the problems start out very easy, but get dramatically more challenging over the course of the month. Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018: https://adventofcode.com/2018/stats https://adventofcode.com/2018/stats
The first few problems are approachable by pretty much anyone who understands how to do arithmetic, file I/O and basic flow control. Many of the later problems require advanced skills such as more sophisticated algorithms (graph theory, dynamic programming, etc.), reverse engineering, and careful debugging.
For what it's worth, I would expect anyone who knows what a loop is to be able to get the first half of today's problem without much difficulty. The second half is a bit less trivial but also pretty easy to understand.
- ken 7y ago> Check out the statistics for how many people completed each problem in 2018 I suspect you'd see a dropoff like this regardless of whether the problems get more difficult or not. Going to the gym doesn't get any harder in February but they see the same effect.
- teraflop 7y agoTrue; I would be interested in seeing the number of logged-in users who viewed and/or attempted each problem.
- bhrgunatha 7y agoThe scatterlpots [1] of the time taken for the leaderboard (top 100) to finish part 1 (silver) and part 2 (gold) are a better indicator of difficulty. I'd like to see a plot of average (median or mode) to finish each part but only the site has all that information. [1] http://www.maurits.vdschee.nl/scatterplot/ http://www.maurits.vdschee.nl/scatterplot/
- sa46 7y agoThose box plots use horizontal jitter within individual boxes to better show overlapping points. That's a neat technique I haven't seen before.
- maxnoe 7y agoseaborn: https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.swarmplot.html#seaborn.swarmplot https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.swarmplot.html#...