I was looking through the global leader board for day 3 today and noticed that the first 100 results are all under 90 seconds, with the top 4 being under 30 seconds. How is that possible? What are people leveraging in order to accomplish this?

  • The_Shwa@midwest.socialOPEnglish
    01·
    10 days ago

    Thinking about it a little more, the answer is a number, and the site tells you if you are too high or too low, so a modification of a binary search might be the answer? I’m not sure if there is a submission limit but if there isnt then that could result in a fast submission.

    Say the answer is 400 and you guess 100, the site tells you it is too low, you guess 1000, the site tells you its too high, now you know its between 100 and 1000, so you can narrow it down with a guess in the middle until you get to the answer. With some automation this would be pretty quick but it would defeat the point of the challenge.

    • Sekoia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      10 days ago

      The timeouts are 1 minute for the first 5 attempts, then 5 minutes.

      People are just really used to AoC’s format and use languages/frameworks that are extremely concise