Advent of Code 2020: Haskell Solution Reflections for all 25 Days

by Justin Le ♦ Wednesday December 30, 2020

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Merry Christmas and Happy New Years, to all!

Once again, every year I like to participate in Eric Wastl’s Advent of Code! It’s a series of 25 Christmas-themed puzzles that release every day at midnight — there’s a cute story motivating each one, usually revolving around saving Christmas. Every night my friends and I (including the good people of freenode’s ##advent-of-code channel) talk about the puzzle and creative ways to solve it (and also see how my bingo card is doing). The subreddit community is also pretty great as well! And an even nicer thing is that the puzzles are open-ended enough that there are often many ways of approaching them…including some approaches that can leverage math concepts in surprising ways, like group theory, galilean transformations and linear algebra, and more group theory. Many of the puzzles are often simple data transformations that Haskell is especially good at!

Speaking of Haskell, I usually do a write-up for every day I can get around to about unique insights that solving in Haskell can provide to each different puzzle. I did them in 2017, 2018, and 2019, but I never finished every day. But 2020 being what it is, I was able to finish! :D

You can find all of them here, but here are links to each individual one. Hopefully you can find them helpful. And if you haven’t yet, why not try Advent of Code yourself? :) And drop by the freenode ##advent-of-code channel, we’d love to say hi and chat, or help out! Thanks all for reading, and also thanks to Eric for a great event this year, as always!