Advent of Code is an annual set of

Christmas Christmas is an annual festival commemorating Nativity of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people Observance of Christmas by country, around t ...

-themed

computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as ana ...

challenges that follow an

Advent calendar An Advent calendar is used to count the days of Advent in anticipation of Christmas. Since the date of the First Sunday of Advent varies, falling between November 27 and December 3 inclusive, many reusable Advent calendars made of paper or wood b ...

. It has been running since 2015. The programming puzzles cover a variety of skill sets and skill levels and can be solved using any

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

. Participants also compete based on speed on both global and private

leaderboards A ladder tournament (also known as a ladder competition or pyramid tournament) is a form of tournament for games and sports. Unlike many tournaments, which usually have an element of elimination, ladder competitions can go on indefinitely. In a lad ...

. The event was founded and is maintained by software engineer Eric Wastl.

History

Advent of Code was created by Wastl, who is still the sole maintainer of the project. The event was initially launched on December 1, 2015. By midnight EST ( UTC−05:00), 81 people had signed up for the event, going slightly over Wastl's planned 70-participant capacity. Within 12 hours, about 4,000 people had joined, nearly causing a system crash. After 48 hours, there were about 15,000 people, and by the end of the 2015 event, the total had risen to 52,000. In 2020, perhaps due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

, the event saw a 50% growth in traffic, with over 180,000 participants worldwide. On December 4, 2022, Wastl announced that the project had reached 1,000,000 registered users.

Puzzle design

Puzzles consist of two parts that must be solved in order, with the second part not revealed to the user until the first part is solved correctly. Participants earn one golden star for each part they finish, giving a possible total of two stars per day and fifty stars per year. Each puzzle contains a fictional

backstory A backstory, background story, back-story, or background is a set of events invented for a plot, presented as preceding and leading up to that plot. It is a literary device of a narrative history all chronologically earlier than the narrative of p ...

that is the same for all participants, but each person receives a different piece of input data and should generate a different correct result. Puzzles are released on a daily schedule from December 1 to December 25 at midnight EST. There is no time limit to complete the puzzles, and puzzles from past years' events remain available to solve. Some participants have used tools such as

GitHub Copilot GitHub Copilot is a cloud-based artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist users of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains integrated development environments (IDEs) by autocompleting code. Currently ...

and

ChatGPT ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned (an approach to transfer learning) with both supervised and ...

to assist in solving the puzzles.

Preparations

According to a

comment Comment may refer to: * Comment (linguistics) or rheme, that which is said about the topic (theme) of a sentence * Bernard Comment (born 1960), Swiss writer and publisher Computing * Comment (computer programming), explanatory text or informat ...

in the

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

code on each page of the event's website, Advent of Code runs using custom

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

code. Wastl claims to build almost the entire website himself, including the design, animations,

prose Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the f ...

, and puzzles. (He relies on other services for

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicati ...

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

, and

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...

integrations.) Each year, Wastl creates and tests the 25 puzzles in advance. This takes 4–5 months of work each year.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://adventofcode.com/ Programming contests