This package contains the source and data for day 6 of the challenge.
- Status: Complete
- Difficulty Rating: 1 / 5
This was the easiest task to date, and also my highest leaderboard position so far this year.
As soon as the task mentioned exponential growth, I knew I was going to have to be careful with how I stored and computed data.
Fortunately storing this in a python dictionary was a very simple solution to this issue, mapping a day countdown timer integer key to a sum of fish value.
This means the 'exponential' part of the data is simply captured in 9 integer values, which isn't particularly computationally intensive to operate on.
I think the 'gotcha' in this task would be with languages that have static length integers, fortunately in python 3 you don't have to worry about this.
CPython uses a variation on 'bignum' arithmetic, where integers are broken up into chunks and can essentially grow indefinitely (provided you don't overflow system memory).
This scaling property barely ever comes in handy for me, but in particular problem it's lovely to not be using a language like java that use static-length integers.
My final sum was 1,572,358,335,990 which needs about 41 bits (6 bytes in practical reality) which is several orders of magnitude above the 32-bit signed integer types many languages have by default.