Update Dec 26 2022 with 2022 scores. Hade a great time again, thanks Eric and Reddit!
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Since 2018 I’m participating in 🎅Advent of Code🎅 and enjoying it a great deal. AoC has been running since 2015, so a sizable amount of data has been generated. Let’s see what we can learn, starting with the amount of stars awarded.
In total there have now been more than 14M stars awarded! After a ‘rough’ 2016, AoC has been steadily growing with 2020 as a (Covid?) 100% boost. And 2022 is just barely finished, many people will earn stars in the days to come.
Edit: as BBQspaceflight indicated on the AoC Reddit, probably 2016 was not a rough year, but many people have been solving 2015 at a later time (e.g. they participated in 2018 and afterwards did 2015).
For a better looking plot, look at Maurits vd Schee. It’s a familiar sight: in general the times are below the hour mark, with a couple going higher. After 2020, the completion times are more compressed. 2022 most difficult puzzle’s were 16 (Proboscidea Volcanium, tunnels with valves), 19 (Not Enough Minerals, collect geodes) and 22 (oh god, it’s a cube?)
Low completion times can be a result of two factors: * The puzzles were easier * The participants where better / more competitive
One way of investigating the difficulty of a year is by analyzing the completion rate: how many people got all the stars compared to the people that got only 1 star of day 25. These people did make it to day 25, thus put a considerable amount of effort in, but couldn’t finish all puzzles.
In the above chart, each rectangle symbolizes the people that solved all puzzles during the year. The height shows the completion rate.
The completion rate was very high in 2016 and 2017 and lowest in 2018. In 2020 many people finished all puzzles, corresponding with more participants that year.
For 2022 the verdict is still out, in a couple of months people will have had time to finish so the completion rate will stabilize. The completion rate of 2022 as of Dec 25th was about 72% and has dropped by 10% in a day! To me this indicates that people doing AoC leisurely and therefore solving day 25 not in the first hours more often don’t get all stars.
Again note that 2022 is very fresh still.
We see that: * The amount of finishers (people getting all stars) peaked in 2020 * The amount of people that got points on the leaderboard is slowly increasing with 2015 also being very high. Why? * The percentage of finishers getting points is varying. Lower percentages could indicate how competitive the year was. Another indicator can be the time it took to solve a puzzle.
The fastest completion times add up to around 3 hours, which is amazing. Since nobody ever finished #1 at all puzzles, this is a theoretical minimum.
The completion times of #100 add up to a more ‘human’ amount. These times are still way below the amount of time a ‘normal’ participant spends on AoC. For example I consider myself an enthusiast, but my completion times are normally about 2-3x the #100.
2022 was very similar compared to 2021.
2022 will move more to the right given time. There does seem to be some correlation between the total time the #100 took and the amount of participants finishing all puzzles. Although I’m not sure if it’s causal, could be there are other variables playing a role.
Getting leaderboard points is special (I made it once for the first time ever this year, yay!). There are people who do it consistently. Let’s give the top 30 some extra recognition🎈
All the people on this top 30 list are amazing, but some awards to hand out: * 🏆Robert Xiao managed to get the most amount of points and overall most leaderboard placements * 🏆betaveros got on average most points & leaderboard entries (ignoring anonymous user here). betaveros also managed to get 50 entries is 2018, which was a one-time event * 🏆glguy for getting the highest score while getting points in all 8 seasons
Doing AoC once and get LB points is nice, but it’s even nicer to do it twice, thrice, etc.
Most of the people that get points manage to do it only once. The y-axis is logaritmic. Who are having so much grit to get points all 8 seasons?
| user | amount_seasons | total_points | total_lb_placements | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | glguy | 8 | 11588 | 184 |
| 14 | etotheipi1 | 8 | 10488 | 191 |
| 19 | msullivan | 8 | 9219 | 162 |
| 23 | Kevin Yap | 8 | 8820 | 154 |
| 39 | (anonymous user #60233) | 8 | 6383 | 128 |
| 97 | Roderic Day | 8 | 3719 | 75 |
| 115 | lukechampine | 8 | 3352 | 75 |
We lost Daniel Rejment and Shane Mc Cormack compared to last year. glguy topping the list. Coming back to our competitiveness discussion, how many points did they score together?
It’s varying but 2020 and 2021 and 2022 are lower. This could reflect: * increased competitiveness during the years * natural variation * legends getting older😊
All in all an amazing achievement! All in all I think there is a strong case for AoC being more competitive after 2019.
Let’s finally turn to which puzzles were easiest or hardest.
| puzzle | user | time (seconds) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 2022-3-1 | ostwilkens | 10 |
| 1 | 2022-4-1 | max-sixty | 16 |
| 2 | 2019-1-1 | bluepichu | 23 |
| 3 | 2018-1-1 | Tris Emmy Wilson | 26 |
| 4 | 2021-1-1 | betaveros | 28 |
Previous year we had a record of 23 second, but thanks to ChatGPT we have 2 new ‘easiest’ puzzles.
| puzzle | lb full (seconds) | |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 2021-1-1 | 65 |
| 1 | 2022-1-1 | 76 |
| 2 | 2019-1-1 | 84 |
| 3 | 2018-1-1 | 92 |
| 4 | 2021-2-1 | 98 |
The leaderboard capped (the #100 completed the puzzle) after barely a minute in 2021 for the first star!
| puzzle | user | time (minutes) | title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 399 | 2018-15-2 | Simon Parent | 36 | Beverage Bandits |
| 398 | 2018-17-2 | Raven Black | 33 | Reservoir Research |
| 395 | 2018-24-2 | Simon Parent | 28 | Immune System Simulator 20XX |
| 394 | 2022-22-2 | mrphlip | 25 | Monkey Map |
| 393 | 2020-20-2 | xiaowuc1 | 25 | Jurassic Jigsaw |
| 392 | 2022-19-2 | lukechampine | 24 | Not Enough Minerals |
| 390 | 2021-23-2 | goffrie | 23 | Amphipod |
| 389 | 2019-18-2 | glguy | 22 | Many-Worlds Interpretation |
| 388 | 2015-22-2 | Paul Hankin | 21 | Wizard Simulator 20XX |
| 387 | 2021-19-2 | ecnerwala | 21 | Beacon Scanner |
The longest 3 solve times were all in 2018! Shoutout to Simon Parent for solving 2 out of the top 3. This list mostly has puzzles that just take a long time to code, with Beverage Bandits as perfect example.
| puzzle | lb full (minutes) | title | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 399 | 2015-19-2 | 232 | Medicine for Rudolph |
| 398 | 2015-1-2 | 186 | Not Quite Lisp |
| 397 | 2015-22-2 | 183 | Wizard Simulator 20XX |
| 396 | 2016-11-2 | 164 | Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators |
| 393 | 2018-15-2 | 143 | Beverage Bandits |
| 392 | 2019-22-2 | 123 | Slam Shuffle |
| 390 | 2019-18-2 | 117 | Many-Worlds Interpretation |
| 388 | 2018-23-2 | 100 | Experimental Emergency Teleportation |
| 387 | 2016-22-2 | 88 | Grid Computing |
| 386 | 2018-24-2 | 87 | Immune System Simulator 20XX |
If we look at when the leaderboard capped some different puzzles show up. I feel that this list has some more algoritmic challenges (Slam Shuffle for example, but Medicine for Rudolph as well). Also 2015 shows up in the top 3. If these puzzles would be recycled in 2021 they would have been solved faster.
Overall, I feel 2018 is a strong contender for the most difficult year, with day 15 the most difficult puzzle in the history of Advent of Code!
Hope you enjoyed this analysis and see you back next year! 🎄⭐🎅