So, like many other problems from this year, this is one of those direct solution problems where there isn’t much of a neat trick to getting the answer. You just have to implement the algorithm they specify and hope you can do it correctly.

a) I used a regex to do some parsing because I haven’t looked at dart regex much and wanted to dip my toes a little.

I considered doing this “properly” with OO classes and subclasses for the different rules. I felt that it would be too difficult and just wrote something janky instead. In hindsight, this was probably the wrong choice, especially since grappling with all the nullable types I had in my single rule class became a little too complex for my melting brain (it is HOT in Australia right now; also my conjunctivae are infected from my sinus infection. So my current IQ is like down 40 IQ points from its normal value of probably -12)

b) There may have been a trick here to simplify the programming (not the processing). Again, I felt that directly implementing the specified algorithm was the only real way forward. In brief:

1. Start with an “open” set containing a part with 4 ranges from [1, 4001) and an “accepted” set that is empty.
2. Start at the workflow “in”
3. For each rule in the current workflow:

• If the rule accepts part of the ranges in the open set, remember those ranges in a closed set and remove them from the open set.
• Remove anything the rule rejects from the open set.
• If the rule redirects to a different workflow W, split off the applicable ranges and recurse at 3 with the current workflow as W.
• Keep in the open set anything the rule doesn’t consider.

Because this is AOC, I assumed that the input would be nice and wouldn’t have anything problematic like overlapping ranges, and I was right. I had a very stupid off by one error that took me a while to find as well.