This year’s Advent of Code has been brutal (compare the stats of 2023 with that of 2022, especially day 1 part 1 vs. day 1 part 2). It included a problem to solve with dynamic programming as soon as day 12, which discouraged some people I know. This specific problem was particularly gnarly for Advent of Code, with multiple special cases to take into account, making it basically intractable if you are not already familiar with dynamic programming. However, dynamic programming itself is mostly nat...