Advent of Code

Neil Smith (AoC++) 24*

      /*2020*/

--- Day 12: Rain Risk ---

Your ferry made decent progress toward the island, but the storm came in faster than anyone expected. The ferry needs to take evasive actions!

Unfortunately, the ship's navigation computer seems to be malfunctioning; rather than giving a route directly to safety, it produced extremely circuitous instructions. When the captain uses the PA system to ask if anyone can help, you quickly volunteer.

The navigation instructions (your puzzle input) consists of a sequence of single-character actions paired with integer input values. After staring at them for a few minutes, you work out what they probably mean:

The ship starts by facing east. Only the L and R actions change the direction the ship is facing. (That is, if the ship is facing east and the next instruction is N10, the ship would move north 10 units, but would still move east if the following action were F.)

For example:

F10
N3
F7
R90
F11

These instructions would be handled as follows:

At the end of these instructions, the ship's Manhattan distance (sum of the absolute values of its east/west position and its north/south position) from its starting position is 17 + 8 = 25.

Figure out where the navigation instructions lead. What is the Manhattan distance between that location and the ship's starting position?

Your puzzle answer was 1106.

--- Part Two ---

Before you can give the destination to the captain, you realize that the actual action meanings were printed on the back of the instructions the whole time.

Almost all of the actions indicate how to move a waypoint which is relative to the ship's position:

The waypoint starts 10 units east and 1 unit north relative to the ship. The waypoint is relative to the ship; that is, if the ship moves, the waypoint moves with it.

For example, using the same instructions as above:

After these operations, the ship's Manhattan distance from its starting position is 214 + 72 = 286.

Figure out where the navigation instructions actually lead. What is the Manhattan distance between that location and the ship's starting position?

Your puzzle answer was 107281.

Both parts of this puzzle are complete! They provide two gold stars: **

At this point, you should return to your Advent calendar and try another puzzle.

If you still want to see it, you can get your puzzle input.

You can also this puzzle.