150,000 Programmers Tackle 'Advent of Code' in Event's 9th Year

"Advent of Code" has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com — and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year's first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two's puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit.

Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day's puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their "Advent of Code with Kotlin" event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle.

It's hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year's event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there's also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS ("so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade") and also curates a collection of "things in PHP which make me sad".

And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year's participants.

So popular and important

[ZERO1ZERO]

Thanks Slashdot for informing me about this advent of code 4 days too late.

Re:So popular and important

[Joce640k]

You must be new here...

Re: So popular and important

[ZERO1ZERO]

Iâ(TM)m eagerly awaiting the dupe of this story.

Re:So popular and important

[pjt33]

The story hit /. about three weeks before I'd expect.

Re:

[MartinG]

It's not too late. Many people don't really care about being fast, it's just about doing the challenges for fun. I know people who don't even start each year until they finish work later in the month and then do several days worth of challenges each day to catch up. I started on time this year, but I am now a couple of days behind because I was busy all weekend.

Re:

[Anubis IV]

Too late? I started on it last night after seeing this summary. The earlier challenges seem to be working just fine for me.

95% of the contestants are ChatGPT

[Un-Thesis]

I bet you 95-99% of the contestants this year cheat with ChatGPT, either partially or completely.

These types of non-proctored challenges are meaningless now in a post-LLM world.

Re:

[bradley13]

I disagree. I'm solving the puzzles because I *like* programming. The part that is the most fun? Figuring out a good approach to the problems. If you ask ChatGPT to propose a solution, you've given away the fun bit, and you're left with testing and debugging someone else's code. Why would you do that to yourself?

This year's problems have been very heavy on the parsing. Spend the effort to parse the input into a nice representation, and the actual logic is just a couple of lines. That's a shame for beginne

Re:

[kaur]

I also disagree. I am part of a small community doing it. Some may look at AI / LLM-s out of curiosity, but most people want to pick their own brains, learn about new algorithms or modules, etc.

My own knowledge about Python regexp is much much better after the first three days in 2023 (I am not a programmer by profession). Positive and negative lookaheads, yay!

Spotify's a sponsor?

[quonset]

Spotify is laying off 17% of its workforce [cnn.com] because they claim they don't have the money. Yet here they are spending money as a sponsor for this event.

Sounds like companies who claim they can't give raises to their employees, then go ahead and do a $4 billion stock buyback.

Re:

[dontbemad]

Not that i would ever want to defend the actions of a corporation, but I can't imagine they are "spending" very much on this. And I say spending in quotes because there is a high likelihood that any money used here will be considered a charitable donation, which has much more beneficial tax implications than employee payroll.

I'm all for holding irresponsible companies accountable, but this probably amounts to a rounding error on their annual financial statements.

Medium-Level

[bill_mcgonigle]

I helped a participant with TBI find some syntax and logic bugs (the requirements were almost ambiguous - no cheating).

Both were fairly simple parsers. One had an indeterminate number of data elements so the regex had to be tighter.

A professional programmer is going to get these done in fifteen minutes but they're clearly aimed at getting non-CS majors to think more about their code.

If you did ACSL challenges in high school they are very similar.

Back then these might have taken me three to four hours. One

Re:

[aardvarkjoe]

Generally the problems get much more difficult as the month goes on. Later in the month it is not unusual to have problems that are very hard to solve if you don't have a solid understanding of various CS concepts and algorithms.

This year, the first few problems have actually been relatively difficult compared to in years past. A few participants have speculated that they're being intentionally designed to make it harder to solve them by just plugging them into a LLM (which got very popular last year.)

Re:

[reiscw]

Generally the problems get much more difficult as the month goes on. Later in the month it is not unusual to have problems that are very hard to solve if you don't have a solid understanding of various CS concepts and algorithms.

This year, the first few problems have actually been relatively difficult compared to in years past. A few participants have speculated that they're being intentionally designed to make it harder to solve them by just plugging them into a LLM (which got very popular last year.)

I agree with you -- I feel that the challenges have been getting harder. I've done various of these going back to 2015. In 2020, I actually did the whole thing (one of my solutions was pretty inefficient, but it worked). This year, the fourth day, second part requires some skills that first year college students don't have (skills taught in a data structures course). I teach AP CS A, which is generally the course right before data structures. I won't say more because some people here probably haven't d

Re:

[pjt33]

Are you sure you mean day 4, part 2? I don't think it needs any data structure other than an array. Day 3, part 2 is definitely trickier.