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§Elves Look, Elves Say
There is a trick to solve this problem in constant time and space. While this is not possible for any arbitrary sequence, in Advent of Code we only need to solve for our given input.
Examining the input shows that it consists of one of Conway’s
atomic elements.
Each element breaks down into other elements that do not interact with each other. This means
that we only need to track the count of each element, rather than deal with the sequence
as a whole. Each step we replace the count of each element with its decay products. For example
if we had five Ni then next step we would decay to five Zn and five Co.
Computing the result is simply multiplying the number of each element by its length. There are 92 elements total so we can use a fixed size array to store the decay chain information.
Constants§
- ELEMENTS 🔒
Functions§
Type Aliases§
- Result 🔒