Solving day 6 of Advent of Code 2022 in JavaScript

Advent of Code is a website that releases a new programming puzzle every day between the 1st and the 25th of December.

0:00 Part 1
5:36 Part 2

Have fun!

[HerrSiering]

Glad you were as surprised as me :D it's quite nice to have an easy day between all the parsing and sorting!

[queuebit]

See you tomorrow! Thanks for the quick one today.

[jimraynor]

Nice videos. I'm doing these puzzles in Javascript too, even though I don't code much in JS. It's interesting to see how someone else approaches the problems. I'm not sure if I have it me to complete all 25 days, but will do my best, and I'll be following your progress. :)

[fluffig]

You're really motivating me :) thanks for that!

[harleyharris]

Your videos are great! I just subscribed. I am trying to improve my JS algorithm skills! For this one, I think I found a nice solution. I cast a slice of the array to a set and if the set is the same length of the slice array, I know all the values are unique. Works for both part 1 + 2 (part 2 solution below):

function findMessage(input_array) {

let message_start;

for (let i = 0; i < input_array.length; i++) {

const unique_signal = new Set([...input_array.slice(i, i+14)]);

if (unique_signal.size === 14) { // 4 distinct characters
message_start = i + 14;
break;
}
}
return message_start;
}