A really quick one today. The example input looks like this:
Time: 7 15 30
Distance: 9 40 200
Every pair of rows represents a race, where the distance is the record distance so far. By pausing at the beginning of the race we gain one distance unit per time unit paused, but lose that time unit in the process. We're to determine the distinct durations we could have paused for during every race in order to beat the record distance, then multiply the results.
We can read the races as a list of pairs:
(define (read-integers in start)
(map string->number
(string-split
(substring (read-line in) start))))
(define races
(call-with-input-file "day06.txt"
(lambda (in)
(define times (read-integers in (string-length "Time:")))
(define distances (read-integers in (string-length "Distance:")))
(map cons times distances))))
And write a procedure to determine whether or not a given hold time would beat the record distance:
(define (win? r hold-time)
(match-define (cons race-time distance) r)
(define travel-time
(- race-time hold-time))
(> (* hold-time travel-time) distance))
Then all we have to do is count the number of times a race could be won within its allotted time:
(define (winning-hold-times r)
(for/sum ([i (in-range (add1 (car r)))]
#:when (win? r i))
1))
And multiply those counds for every race together:
(for/fold ([res 1])
([r (in-list races)])
(* res (winning-hold-times r)))
For part two, we need to append all the race times and durations together into one long race. So, instead of interpreting our example input as three separate races, we need to interpret it as if it were written without any spaces:
Time: 71530
Distance: 940200
Let's append the races together into our input for part two:
(define one-race
(let ([m (λ (n) (expt 10 (exact-ceiling (log n 10))))])
(for/fold ([t 0] [d 0] #:result (cons t d))
([r (in-list races)])
(match-define (cons r-t r-d) r)
(values (+ (* t (m r-t)) r-t)
(+ (* d (m r-d)) r-d)))))
Finally, we can just call our winning-hold-times procedure on the
one-race value to find the solution for part two. The input is small
enough to brute force in a couple hundred milliseconds.
If the input for part two were larger, we could use a closed form solution. We've already expressed a race's solution as:
x(t - x) > d
Where x is the hold time required to beat the record d. We can
expand that expression to:
-x^2 + tx - d > 0
And we can solve for x using the quadratic formula and get all
possible values of x for any given distance:
(define (winning-hold-times* r)
(match-define (cons t d) r)
(define discriminant (sqrt (- (* t t) (* 4 d))))
(define hi (exact-ceiling (/ (+ t discriminant) 2)))
(define lo (exact-floor (/ (- t discriminant) 2)))
(- hi lo 1))