advent of code 2019, problem 13.2

Advent of Code is an advent calendar of small coding problems. Typically, solutions to later problems rely on extending tools you create to solve earlier problems.

This year we have built a virtual computer to run programmes to solve some of the problems.

In problem 13 we are given a computer programme for a game and asked to find the final score when the game ends.

Here is a sample of the start of the programme:

1,380,379,385,1008,2267,610415,381,1005,381,12,99,109,2268,1101,0,0,383,1101,0,0,382,20102,1,382,1,20101,0,383,2,21101,37,0,0,1106,0,578,4,382,4,383,204,1,...

The programme can be run and the score read from the output.

But to make this more interesting I created a “computer screen” to show the game running.

A new discovery for me

When you get to your ‘senior’ years the perception is you tend to wallow in nostalgia for the music you grew up listening to. In that case why have most of my recent classical music purchases been of contemporary music? 😕 This piece is my latest discovery and has got me listening to a lot of other etudes by Philip glass

Poem/Haiku

ghosts of yourself moving down the hall
walk away to escape the past
leaving music floating in the air
ghosts of the sound you once made

ghosts of yourself moving down the hall
walk away to escape the past
leaving music floating in the air
ghosts of the sound you once made

Stephen

late august morning
Prickly thorns, brambles galore
sticky stained fingers

Above is a Haiku in response to Gary’s ‘jam’.

late august
brambles
thorns
fingers stained

From Tuesday 16, August 2016

Allan

Clive James – Event Horizon

On hearing of the death of Clive James I reread his poem Event Horizon from 2013.

Event Horizon

For years we fooled ourselves. Now we can tell
How everyone our age heads for the brink
Where they are drawn into the unplumbed well,
Not to be seen again. How sad, to think
People we once loved will be with us there
And we not touch them, for it is nowhere.

Never to taste again her pretty mouth!
It’s been forever, though, since last we kissed.
Shadows evaporate as they go south,
Torn, by whatever longings still persist,
Into a tattered wisp, a streak of air,
And then not even that. They get nowhere.

But once inside, you will have no regrets.
You go where no one will remember you.
You go below the sun when the sun sets,
And there is nobody you ever knew
Still visible, nor even the most rare
Hint of a face to humanise nowhere.

Are you to welcome this? It welcomes you.
The only blessing of the void to come
Is that you can relax. Nothing to do,
No cruel dreams of subtracting from your sum
Of follies. About those, at last, you care:
But soon you need not, as you go nowhere.

Into the singularity we fly
After a stretch of time in which we leave
Our lives behind yet know that we will die
At any moment now. A pause to grieve,
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere.