In preparation for this year’s event I started to create a utility library and realized that I might not even need to care about decimal, or even fractional numbers, as I don’t remember ever encountering them while solving a problem so far. Does anyone have any examples for problems which required using floating point calculations? Is it maybe even explicitly stated that they are not needed? (I remember that Google Code Jam had some statistical problems where the solution didn’t have to be exact, just within an acceptable error margin, but that isn’t likely to happen here, right?)
AOC answers do need to be exact though, right? That implies integers only IMO, and I think that’s all I’ve ever seen… Not certain though.
They could use fixed point numbers instead of floating point ones. Fixed point is exact
Yep, you’re right. But then puzzles would need to spend words explaining that detail, and participants would need to worry about how their language deals with non-integer numbers… Javascript users for example would have an annoying experience. It’s a snag that you could avoid just by having integer-only problems.
AoC usually avoids being fiddly about details of the actual tech-- You seldom see problems refer to data types or structures. The intent is to keep them open to as many programming languages (and other computation methods) as possible. It makes sense to me to stick to integers for that.
I suppose they also don’t want to make it too difficult for people using languages without decimal support, like Javascript.