this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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Advent Of Code
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An unofficial home for the advent of code community on programming.dev! Other challenges are also welcome!
Advent of Code is an annual Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
Everybody Codes is another collection of programming puzzles with seasonal events.
EC 2025
AoC 2025
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| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
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- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep all content related to advent of code in some way
- If what youre posting relates to a day, put in brackets the year and then day number in front of the post title (e.g. [2024 Day 10])
- When an event is running, keep solutions in the solution megathread to avoid the community getting spammed with posts
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Kotlin
This one was a journey.
Part 1 is just a greedy search over all the corner pairs to find the largest area.
I began part 2 with just using Java AWT, which worked but was slow. I didn't want to implement a proper polygon intersection algorithm and found a few patterns in the input.
Basically: All lines are axis aligned and all lines are orthogonal to the lines before and after them. This allows me to easily partition and sort the lists of lines. Because all the lines are axis-aligned and the lines are allowed to be on the edges of the rectangles, a smart check against all the lines can be constructed. Horizontal lines above and below and vertical lines to the left or to the right of the rectangle can be skipped entirely. This cuts the time down tremendously.
I needed to implement a custom binary search, though. The standard lib only supplies a search that gives any element that matches the target, not specifically the first one.
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