Day 8 was another pretty interesting puzzle, taking a standard grid-like problem and making it a bit more interesting to work with. The first step is almost always collecting all of the grind points and the value associated with that, luckily we didn’t have to do looping in this because we could copy and generate some standard grouping of all rows and all columns since we’re just doing up, down, left, right looking (nothing diagonal, etc). There’s a number of mapper steps that I take at the end that MIGHT be able to be combined into fewer steps, but I think I liked having the ability to turn on “Pass Through” and debug data as necessary during development.
The one thing I’ll say about doing this problem is that the expression language (and javascript) sort is dumb when you don’t provide a callback function, and as a result, it should probably be taken out back and given a talking to (that was a nice bug to resolve only on my puzzle input data). The other potential note here is that some of these things (as indicated by the warning signs on my “Collect All”) are probably not necessarily great for long-term uses, if you needed to do some of this collection, it might be better to stage in a local disk file, or do group by fields to have fewer collections, with the size of data we have for these puzzles, this is probably fine, though.
Screenshot:
SLP File:
day08_2022_12_08.slp (48.1 KB)
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