In general, I'm really enjoying this year's AOC. There have been some really great challenges, and 13 was a personal highlight for me.

However, the challenges that make me groan are the MD5-based challenges, of which there have been two this year. I've been solving problems this year using Wolfram Language/Mathematica, and while I generally find it a really interesting language to use, the MD5 hashing function is very slow. Around 1kh/s slow.

So after running my code for part 1, it was a little infuriating to see part 2: something that's an absolutely trivial code adjustment, but would eat ~12h of my CPU time seeing as it takes me 2s to calculate every single one of these nested hashes!

The thing that gets me is that the number chosen (2016) doesn't add anything to the challenge other than screwing over languages with slow MD5 implementations. I'm sure others have this problem too! In general, I've found these much less interesting than some of the other problems. What do you all think?