Day 08 has us counting trees, in two ways.
Part A asks us to count trees visible from the perimeter. There are surely more efficient ways, but scanning rows & columns gets us there easily.
Part B asks us to find the tree from which we can count the most trees in the cardinal directions. (It’s a little more complicated than this, because we multiply out the directions and not add, but that’s the gist.)
Visualization
I opted to include both parts in the visualization. I don’t think either part stands alone, but gluing them together with the context of a device / software is I think quite lovely.
New Features
This was the first puzzle this year where the GIF took a while to render. To help with this, I actually parallelized the canvas rendering phrase, where we convert our 2D glyph array into pixels.
I also added several new glyphs to help here, ✔, -, and + (though + did
not end up used in the final rendering.)