2025-advent-of-code

denis schluppeck

Following along with the Advent of Code 2025 in Matlab.

General idea is to have a folder per day with solutions in Matlab scripts/functions and maybe upload some walkthroughs or explanations as needed (video clips?)

Matrix Christmas Tree

Example (2024)

• An example from 2024 - Day 1 to show how to go about a solution in Matlab.

Solutions

• Day 1
• Day 2 - not easy (julia!)
• Day 3 - a bit more straightforward
• Day 4 - toilet rolls!
• Day 5 - julia BigInt support needed again…
• Day 6 - cephalopod maths!
• Day 7 - part 1 ok - in part 2 I was defeated by my lack of dynamic programming foo!
• Day 8 - defeated something 😀
• Day 9 - Elves and red/green tiles. Part 1 straightforward, part 2 not solved.
• Day 10 - flicking switches… only read problem (time!)
• Day 11 - Pathfinding with Graphs.jl (managed 1st part, 2nd part was tricky!)

Ideas

• some things are easy to do in Matlab (arrays, tabular data, and so on). Some other things (eg reading in text data, files and converting into a reasonable shape) might end up a bit harder

• a secondary consideration is to use Matlab’s language features to solve the puzzles efficiently (e.g. vectorization, matrix operations, and so on)

• maybe some visualizations (plots, images, animations) where appropriate

• ultmately, functions are better than scripts (more reusable, easier to test, and so on). So maybe try to write functions where possible.