Day 13: Claw Contraption
Picat: Part 1 (00:30:45, rank 3381), Part 2 (00:32:36, rank 1197)
This seemed like a fine problem for a CP or SAT solver, which comes built into Picat. Indeed, it produced the correct answer as soon as I gave it the right info, but I wasted a huge amount of time on parsing with backtracking append chains.
Thanks to the constraint solver magic, part 2 took basically the same time as part 1 and no changes were needed other than modifying the prize locations. Afterwards, I rewrote the parser and simplified it a good bit. Disappointed I took so long on that in part 1, but it's fun to reach for Picat's CP/SAT solvers at any opportunity. CP solved this in about 28ms, while SAT took 1.75s, probably due to the large domains. Always try CP first.
Benchmark 1: picat part1.pi < input
Time (mean ± σ): 25.1 ms ± 0.9 ms [User: 14.0 ms, System: 11.0 ms]
Range (min … max): 23.8 ms … 29.3 ms 117 runs
Benchmark 1: picat part2.pi < input
Time (mean ± σ): 27.8 ms ± 0.7 ms [User: 16.6 ms, System: 11.1 ms]
Range (min … max): 26.6 ms … 30.7 ms 105 runs