from Hacker News

Advent of Code analysis through the years

by chkas on 12/26/24, 12:32 PM with 4 comments

• by mckirk on 12/26/24, 6:57 PM

  It would be very interesting to have solve times for more than the top 100 spots this year. If you analyzed those, I think there's a decent chance you would see a clear bimodal distribution -- one for people coding 'legit', and one for the LLM cheaters. The prevalence of cheating this year really was quite something: people didn't even try to hide it, and proudly occupied the highest leaderboard positions with impossible solve times, using their real names and GitHub profiles.

  I can't help but feel that with this, the 'golden age' of AoC is over, because the overlap between coding puzzles that LLMs can solve in seconds and puzzles that humans enjoy solving in their free time during advent has become too large. One suggestion on reddit, where people discussed this issue, was to get rid of the global leaderboard entirely, and only have smaller private leaderboards, maybe even with moderation that could deal with the blatant cheaters. But that would also be kind of sad, since this idea of global competition definitely was part of the AoC charm, at least for the competitively motivated people. We'll see where it goes next year.

  For now though: Thanks Eric, if you read this, for the years of joy AoC has brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) to so many people :)