This puzzle challenge brings joy to the world of code

By midnight on December 1, 2015, Eric Wastl launched his annual Santa Claus-themed Everyday Smarter Programming Challenge for the first time The appearance of the code, 81 people have signed up. This is almost in line with his capacity plan for 70 participants. Wastl believes that this kind of entertainment may arouse the interest of some friends, friends of friends, and even some of their friends.

However, Wastl, a software engineer who is the senior architect of the trading card game online market TCGPlayer, failed to anticipate that the recursive spread of social media might overwhelm these moderate expectations.he joke The technical term for what happened next was: “Oh, no!” In 12 hours, there were approximately 4,000 participants. The server almost crashed. There were 15,000 people at 48 hours, and by the end of the event on December 25, the total number was 52,000. In the second year, he moved his business to Amazon Web Services, and the number has continued to grow since then.

Last year, perhaps due to the pandemic, the event’s traffic surged by 50%, with more than 180,000 participants worldwide.

This year, from San Francisco to Slovenia, thousands of programmers—students, software engineers, and competitive programmers—are counting down for the advent of code (AoC).Although the traditional Advent calendar will give out chocolate or toy gifts every day (there are some choose The version offers dog treats, Jack Daniel’s, Lego dolls, and even Digital fun Through the application), the emergence of Coders solves playful mathematical problems, and then writes small computer programs to solve the problems.

Part of its fun lies in the long-standing magic of the festival ceremony. But it is also succumbing to pleasant confusion. Google Research Director Peter Norvig finds this interesting because he believes that the creator Wastl “makes my time worthwhile”-Norvig said, this is in line with the New York Times crossword puzzler’s trust in Will Shortz The way to do it right is similar to being by them. “There will be some tricks to make it interesting,” Norvig said, “but its tricks are limited.”

The joy of coding

At midnight Eastern Time (Wastl is headquartered in Buffalo, New York), every night from December 1 to 25, a new puzzle will be adventofcode.com, Embedded in a cleverly combined Merry Christmas story-one player described this story as “a Excuse plot If there is such a thing. “

This year’s event had a good start because Santa’s elves lost their keys to the sleigh. The first question is to set the scene as follows: “When the falling water alarm goes off, you are dealing with your own affairs on a ship at sea! Hurry up and see if you can help. Obviously one of the elves tripped and accidentally took the sled key. Flew into the sea!”

Fortunately, the wizard has a submarine that can handle this emergency, and the participants started a 25-day underwater mission from there. They try to solve two puzzles every day (the second one adds a twist, or is harder), each worthy of a star and some compliments: “This is the correct answer! You are closer to finding the key to the sled by a gold star .”

Each player gets a star by solving problems, but if you are the first person to get a star, you will get 100 points; if you are second, you will get 99 points; and so on, the 10th place will get one cent.

“To save Christmas,” explained the puzzle master, “you need to get all fifty stars by December 25.”

The goal of Advent of Code is to solve difficult problems using the programming language of your choice (Python is the most popular). Participants also use hooks or scammer strategies-such as “Excel madness”, as described by Wastl, or a large amount of graph paper, and an astonishing number of puzzles solved in Minecraft.

But the broader motivation varies from player to player. Some people see it as an annual adjustment of their programming skills; others see it as a great opportunity to learn to code or try a new language. José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, is broadcasting his AoC Solutions on Twitch.

At the top of the world LeaderboardAmong the 100 players with the highest total score, competitive programmers like Brian Chen (his handle is “betaveros”) and Andrew He (“ecnerwala”) are For speed. A security software engineer is committed to End-to-end encryption At Zoom, Chen ranked first last year (and the year before), and he followed closely behind.

“It’s fun to move fast,” Chen said. “It’s like optimizing anything that can get immediate feedback. There are many small knobs to adjust, and there are many small moments for you to make the right choice or prepare something useful. pride.”

Chen and He, a MIT computer alumnus living in the Bay Area, are friendly competitors and have been competing together in programming challenges for many years-in the same team International College Student Programming Competition (ICPC) and being a competitor Code power and Google’s Code JamThis year, Chen defeated He again. “To be honest, it’s because he is a little better than me”-better at optimizing the various techniques and implementations of speed-“but I don’t like to admit this,” said He, the founding engineer of the startup Modal. The company built the infrastructure and tools for the data team.

For most participants, leaderboards are out of reach—especially as the puzzles become harder and harder. Kathryn Tang, who manages the engineering operations team at Shopify, was ranked 36th on the first day and 81st on the third day, but she knew that her ranking would not last long. “I did this for fun using Google Sheets,” she said.

However, elements of the competition are copied in Shopify and Google and many companies large and small, including private leaderboards, and dedicated chat channels where players share solutions and post-mortem problems.

“Competitiveness helps promise,” engineer Alec Brickner commented on the Slack channel of Primer.ai, a natural language processing startup in San Francisco (Brickner has been on the rankings within a few days List).

“Well,” his colleague Michael Lekham replied. “For me, the reward is the joy of coding.”

John Bohannon, Primer’s scientific director, echoed an emoji: “Same.”

Bohannon also likes stupid stories about setting problems, but the plot is almost useless or even zero. “The speed demon solver completely ignores the story, focuses on the variables of the problem to be solved, and then directly solves it,” he said.

Nora Petrova, a data scientist and engineer at Primer’s office in London, UK, is for beauty, not sport: “I like the drama that unfolds in every puzzle,” she said. For example, on the fourth day, a giant squid attaches itself to a submarine-of course, it wants to play a bingo game. The puzzle input is a random set of 100 bingo boards, and the challenge is to predict the winning board and give it to Squid.

love it XOR Hate it

Wastl’s main motivation for creating Advent of Code was to help people become better programmers. “Beginners who are new to programming are the ones I want to get the most from,” he said. “For most people, the measure of success should be’How many new things have I learned?’-not’Am I one of the fastest people in the world to solve this problem?'”

Russell Helmstedter is a middle school teacher at the De Anza College of Technology and Art in Ventura, California. He is using Advent of Code to teach Python to his sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students. They solve the first two problems together as a class. From a teaching point of view, these questions are effective exercises, because if you fail, you can simply try again-very much in line with the spirit of test-driven software development.

Helmstedter found that some of his students were a little overwhelmed by the double challenge—deciphering the problem and coding machines to solve it—but most people accepted the struggle. “I like it’s hard to do,” a student said in a survey. Another person said, “To be honest, there are no shortcomings. I really like the way you start to work towards a goal.” Although the survey’s multiple-choice ranking “feel” triggered an “annoying”, but 41 respondents chose “like” (various levels) and 8 “likes”.

Master of Technology | Emergence of Code

At the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, computer scientist Janez Demšar used AoC problems as a professor and hone his skills (he tangerinr, An open source machine learning and data visualization toolbox). “I need to practice regularly, like a violinist playing in an orchestra and some teaching, but still need some small works to practice,” he said. “So these are my etudes.” Demšar teaches programming 101 to a diverse group of more than 200 students. “What I care about most is,” he said, “how to keep those who already know some (or a lot) of programming interested and engaged. AoC tasks are great because they require a variety of skills”-from pure coding to algorithms .

Gregor Kikelj, a third-year mathematics undergraduate at the university, tried Advent of Code for the first time in 2019. He did a good job, doing an internship at Comma.ai (working on Openpilot, its semi-autonomous driving system software), because the company’s founder is also participating in the competition. Kikelj improved his grades in the programming course (with another professor), because every problem solved is worthy of extra points on the final exam-plus extra points on the leaderboard.

Kikelj (“grekiki”) wakes up every morning to participate in a jigsaw puzzle game-at 6 am in Slovenia-and ranks 52 on the leaderboard, earning a total of 23 additional test points. “After that year, they set the upper limit of the points you can get to 5,” he recalled. But he still faced the sun rising and threw himself at the puzzle. His best ranking this year, on the fifth day, is 25th-his goal is to remain in the top 100. “As the problem gets harder and harder, we will see how it goes,” Kikelj said.

How to rank the leaderboard

If the leaderboard is your game, then the competition is fierce, and the daily countdown is the key-players wait for the puzzle to drop like an eagle, and then click lickety-split to download. Last year, this “huge burst of traffic synchronized to one second” (as Wastl described it) even plagued Amazon’s load balancer.

This AoC sub-section-One of the many communities on the Internet-full of internal baseball How to win (and solution And help topics, as well as self-sarcasm and memes). But the best resource is probably Brian Chen’s blog post”How to rank the leaderboard. “