Advent of Code was very easy today

for even more context, 4 years ago is a 5th of my life

I may have stopped the dailies some point along the road but you shouldn't OneFist. You represent the best of us

Thursday, September 19th, 2019. At this time I would have just started Year 12. This is the first year after GCSEs in the UK. I believe it is also referred to as either highschool or college depending on where you're from but I can't guarantee

Day 220. My first comment was Woot! and my first reply was to that same comment (because that's how xp used to work) which was "Double Woot!"

just looking back to find my oldest comment and saw this again. I'm so glad someone picked reincarnator back up for those last 40 chapters. This makes me want to read it again

Woo level up. I'm very slow to level up because I never use the app so i never get the super xp. But I've leveled up. Today has been quite a good day actually (not solely because of this)

Good good. That means my souls in the bank are getting more valuable! Supply and demand

Exactly. Bogo sort is the best

We also won the prize for "Hackiest Hack" which is quite fitting considering we had 3 different coordinate systems in our code and our code was based on a try-catch statement inside a while true loop so that if it is impossible and an error occurs, we can pretend it never happened and try again.

Also text wall, oops

Also, someone else has tried this. 3 final year undergraduate students in a university in Canada attempted to solve this same problem as their final year thesis project. They only got combinatorial logic working (i.e. and, not, nand) however we got sequential logic working as well (i.e. d-type flip flop). So we beat their thesis project in only 24 hours. The sequential logic allows us to do stuff like the counter because the counter requires knowledge of state, it requires you to know what the current number is but this is impossible in sequential logic.Granted, if you compare both of our solutions on a sequential logic problem, theirs would probably be faster and more compact. But again, ours is more general.

Over the weekend I did my first hackathon with a couple friends. It was 24 hours long (as are most) and you have to code a project. It can be anything as long as it's within 24 hours. The hack in hackathon isn't hacking into something, it's hacking a solution together. I pulled an all nighter, staying awake for 34 hours total and our project was converting Verilog HDL (Hardware Description Language) into Minecraft redstone. Verilog is used in "the industry" and can be used for things such as designing computer chips. Our program can take a Verilog file and implement it in redstone. The program was completed in 24 hours, it works. The main problem is with routing the logic gates together. how do you route the gates so that the wires don't cross and don't interfere, and while paying attention to redstone signal strength? This is similar to what chip manufacturers face. Theoretically, you could put the design of an intel chip into our program and it would work. The issue is that it would take ages to find a solution. We only had 24 hours for this very ambitious project so efficiency was not our goal. Our program can route a 3-bit counter in reasonable time but more complex examples take longer. I accidentally left my computer on overnight after the hackathon and it was running the program on a 4-bit adder. 21 hours later, it couldn't find a solution (or was stuck in a loop). Theoretically our program has a worst case complexity of O(Forever) because we use a random shuffle to place the gates because some gates are impossible. We shuffle the gates, if it's impossible we shuffle it again and try again

hope you get better soon

yeah, rebuilding emotions is tough

according to this, I'm owed an up right about now

i hope this doesn't lead to a server wipe like it did for the dinosaurs

imagine having a camera with functional zoom. Mine zooms but it just enlarges the image, so you don't gain any data making it blurry af. Other people's camera on the other hand can actually keep image quality while zooming

why wake up for sunrise when you can just not sleep?

we believe in you, you got this!