Sekoia

Spoilers and explanation of solution:

Each vertex here is one intersection in our hike. We don't actually care about the parts in-between, because there's only one way to go. The above is a visualisation of the final path, the red edges are the edges taken. Our graph looks "like that" because it's a hiking trail, not a maze, so there's no dead ends. This took about 2 seconds to generate, due to all the cloning needed to keep track of paths. The two veeery long edges on the ends are pretty obvious choices, but one might notice that pretty much every vertex takes the two maximum paths it has, given the restrictions of the path. There's still some mildly surprising paths, such as (99, 29) -> (89, 37) with a weight of 38. I'm wondering if there's a way to dismiss more paths... This graph is actually pretty free in terms of movement.

My actual solution takes ~150 ms to run (and 8 microseconds for part one with barely any optimization, damnn)

Anybody got some ideas to optimize today? I've got it down to 65ms (total) on my desktop, using A* with a visitation map. Each cell in the visitation map contains (in part 2) 16 entries; 4 per direction of movement, 1 for each level of straightaway. In part 2, I use a map with 11 entries per direction.

Optimizations I've implemented:

• use a 2D array instead of a hashset/map. No idea how much this saves, I did it in the first place.
• the minimum distance for a specific cell's direction + combo applies for higher combo levels as well for part 1. For part 2, if the current combo is greater than 4, we do the same*. Gains about 70(!!) ms
• A* heuristic weighting optimization, a weight of about 1% with a manhattan distance heuristic seems to gain about 15 ms (might be my input only tho)

*Correctness-wise: the reason we're splitting by direction is because there's a difference between being at a cell going up with a 3 combo but a really short path, and going right with a 0 combo but a long path. However, this is fine because a 3 combo in the same direction as a 0 combo is identical, just more restrictive.

Optimizations that could be done but I need to ensure correctness:

the same optimization for the combo, but for directions. If I'm on a specific combo+direction, does that imply something about the distance for another direction? Simply doing the same for every non-opposite direction isn't correct

Code: https://codeberg.org/Sekoia/adventofcode/src/branch/main/src/y2023/day17.rs

Warning: quite ugly, there's like 8 copy-pastes for adding to the queue