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It’s that time of year again. And not just for Secret Santa—it’s time for the Advent of Code, a series of programming puzzles in the lead-up to Christmas.

I’m doing the 2021 challenge in R—in the form of an open-source R package, to demonstrate a test-driven workflow.

Each puzzle description typically comes with a few simple examples of inputs and outputs. We can use these to define expectations for unit tests with the testthat package. Once a function passes the unit tests, it should be ready to try with the main puzzle input.

Check my adventofcode2021 repository on GitHub for the latest.

remotes::install_github('Selbosh/adventofcode2021')

## Day 1 – Sonar Sweep

### Increases

To count the number of times elements are increasing in a vector it’s as simple as

depths <- c(199, 200, 208, 210, 200, 207, 240, 269, 260, 263)
sum(diff(depths) > 0)
## [1] 7

for which I defined a function called increases.

### Rolling sum

For part two, we first want to calculate the three-depth moving sum, then we count the increases as in part one. There are plenty of solutions in external R packages for getting lagged (and leading) vectors, for instance dplyr::lag() and dplyr::lead():

depths + dplyr::lead(depths) + dplyr::lead(depths, 2)
##  [1] 607 618 618 617 647 716 769 792  NA  NA

Or you could even calculate the rolling sum using a pre-made solution in zoo (Z’s Ordered Observations, a time-series analysis package).

zoo::rollsum(depths, 3)
## [1] 607 618 618 617 647 716 769 792

To avoid loading any external packages at this stage, I defined my own base R function called rolling_sum(), which uses tail and head with negative lengths to omit the first and last elements of the vector:

head(depths, -2) + head(tail(depths, -1), -1) + tail(depths, -2)
## [1] 607 618 618 617 647 716 769 792

As David Schoch points out, you can just use the lag argument of diff to make this entire puzzle into a one-liner:

sapply(c(1, 3), \(lag) sum(diff(depths, lag) > 0))
## [1] 7 5