Kevin Wilkie continues a Quixotic quest. Part 1 sets up the story:
Now we get to work with a set of numbers that our elf played and a set of winning numbers for each card. This sounds like something that SQL is meant for!
As always, we load the fun input data provided by the AoC group into our database. I actually loaded it in as 2 columns – Card and String. I’m just not a fan of throwing all of our data into one column of a table and letting it all get sorted out later.
With part 1, we just had to figure out how many times each of the winners showed up. With part 2 though, we have to jump through several hoops since we now have to determine how many cards we will end up with if we win the next series of cards for every match.
I slimmed down the table that I’m working with to only 2 columns – yes, in the real world, I would have used a view, but today was not that day.
By the way, as soon as I saw OverlyLongNamesThatNoOneCanTypeWithoutUsingIntellisense I wondered when Kevin got access to my code base. I have, on a few occasions, created punishment names, names so long that they punished the people who had to type or track them. In fairness, it wasn’t just a fit of pique, though pique was a common factor in all of those situations.