Advent of Code analysis through the years

Since 2018 I’m participating in 🎅Advent of Code🎅 and enjoying it a great deal. AoC has been running since 2015, so a sizable amount of data has been generated. Let’s see what we can learn, starting with the amount of stars awarded.

In total there have now been more than 23M stars awarded (+5M compared to last year)! And 2024 is just barely finished, many people will earn stars in the days to come.

One way of investigating the difficulty of a year is by analyzing the completion rate: how many people got all the stars compared to the people that got only 1 star of day 25. These people did make it to day 25, thus put a considerable amount of effort in, but couldn’t finish all puzzles.

In the above chart, each rectangle symbolizes the people that solved all puzzles during the year. The height shows the completion rate.

The completion rate was very high in 2016 and 2017 and has dropped in recent years, corresponding with more participants each year. I found it interesting 2024 has a high completion rate.

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