Advent of Code 2021 -- Day 1: Sonar Sweep

It’s the most wonderful time of year – I’m not talking about silly things like warm blankets, family, and Christmas cheer… no, I’m excited that Advent of Code is finally here!¹

In case you don’t know Advent of Code is a fun set of programming challenges devised by Eric Wastl that you must complete in order to save Christmas. Each day you are presented with two problems to solve, the second being an extension unlocked after successfully completing the first. You are rewarded for your efforts with a shiny gold star. The problems start off somewhat easy and amp up the difficulty over the course of the month and are a great way to learn a new language. I’ll write my solutions in Common Lisp again this year because there is still so much for me to improve on with it.

The first part of today’s puzzle required counting the number of times an entry in a list of numbers was greater than the one before. This was done relatively painlessly using Lisp’s loop construct (which I feel I am only just using properly). It simply sets b to the current list item, a to the previous item (and nil to begin with), then for every item but the first compares b with a. I particularly like the count clause which counts the number of times the expression following it evaluates to t.

(defun advent-01a (filename)
  (loop with input = (mapcar #'parse-integer (get-file filename))
        for a = nil then b
        for b in input
        when a
        count (> b a)))

Part two was a slight modification of the previous part: now we had to keep track of a sliding window of size three and count the number of times the sum of the elements in the window exceeded the sum of the elements in the previous window. Only a few changes were required to the code, and the on clause was very useful for assigning and working with the elements of the sliding window.

(defun advent-01b (filename)
  (loop with input = (mapcar #'parse-integer (get-file filename))
        for (a b c) on input
        while (and a b c)
        for prev-sum = nil then sum
        for sum = (+ a b c)
        when prev-sum
        count (> sum prev-sum)))

One generalisation that could be made is the size of the sliding window, though it’s not immediately obvious how to change for (a b c) in input to reflect this. Being Lisp I imagine it might require the use of macros, which is something I’m still not that well versed in.

Overall quite a relaxed introduction back into Advent of Code. I’m pleased with what I’ve written, not least because it looks clean, and I’m looking forward to spending (and inevitably, wasting) more time on these puzzles over the rest of the month – it’s not like I have an important viva to be working on…

Footnotes