this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Advent of code 2023 day 24 part 2. Z3 solver saved the day on that one.
Now I have PTSD every time I see an hailstorm.
So many solver solutions that day, either Z3 or Gauss-Jordan lol. I got a little obsessed about doing it without solvers or (god forbid) manually solving the system and eventually found a relatively simple way to find the intersection with just lines and planes:
It's a suboptimal solution in that it uses 4 hailstones instead of the theoretical minimum of 3, but was a lot easier to wrap my head around. Incidentally, it is not too hard to adapt the above algorithm to not need C (i.e., to use only 3 hailstones) by using line intersections. Such a solution is not much more complicated than what I gave and still has a simple geometric interpretation, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader :)
That is a great explanation of how you solved it, thanks! I should go back to it and conquer that puzzle properly without a solver. Or at least try.