Advent of Code 2017 in #rstats: Day 11

Once I realized that moves on a hex grid map nicely to a standard rectangular grid, this was easy.   Despite playing hours of Settlers of Catan, I’d never realized this relationship.  Maybe because nothing traverses that hex grid?

North and South move one step up or down.  The four diagonal directions move a half-step up or down and a full column laterally.  The shortest solution path will be diagonal moves to reach the desired column, then vertical moves to the right row.

It took only a minute or two to modify my part 1 function for part 2, so I present both together.

Parts 1 & 2

library(dplyr); library(testthat)

steps_needed <- function(dat){
  lat <- 0
  lon <- 0
  max_dist <- 0
  current_dist <- 0
  for(i in seq_along(dat)){
    if(dat[i] == "n"){lat <- lat + 1}
    if(dat[i] == "s"){lat <- lat - 1}
    if(dat[i] == "ne"){lat <- lat + 0.5; lon <- lon + 1}  
    if(dat[i] == "se"){lat <- lat - 0.5; lon <- lon + 1}
    if(dat[i] == "nw"){lat <- lat + 0.5; lon <- lon - 1}
    if(dat[i] == "sw"){lat <- lat - 0.5; lon <- lon - 1}
    
    current_distance <-   
      abs(lon) + # diagonal steps to move horizontally
      abs(lat) - 0.5 * abs(lon) # vertical steps, adjusted for prev diagonal moves
    
    max_dist <- max(c(max_dist), current_distance)
    current_dist <- current_distance
  }
  structure(c(current_dist, max_dist),
            names = c("Current Distance", "Maximum Distance"))
}

# Tests
expect_equal(steps_needed(c("se","sw","se","sw","sw")), 3)
expect_equal(steps_needed(c("ne", "ne", "ne")), 3)
expect_equal(steps_needed(c("ne", "ne", "sw", "sw")), 0)
expect_equal(steps_needed(c("ne", "ne", "s", "s")), 2)

# Execute
dat <- unlist(str_split(scan("11_1_dat.txt", "character"), ","))
steps_needed(dat)

# Current Distance Maximum Distance 
# 722 1551