Description
Santa needs help mining some AdventCoins (very similar to bitcoins) to use as gifts for all the economically forward-thinking little girls and boys.
To do this, he needs to find MD5 hashes which, in hexadecimal, start with at least five zeroes. The input to the MD5 hash is some secret key (your puzzle input, given below) followed by a number in decimal. To mine AdventCoins, you must find Santa the lowest positive number (no leading zeroes: 1
, 2
, 3
, ...) that produces such a hash.
For example:
- If your secret key is
abcdef
, the answer is609043
, because the MD5 hash ofabcdef609043
starts with five zeroes (000001dbbfa...
), and it is the lowest such number to do so. - If your secret key is
pqrstuv
, the lowest number it combines with to make an MD5 hash starting with five zeroes is1048970
; that is, the MD5 hash ofpqrstuv1048970
looks like000006136ef...
.
--- Part Two ---
Now find one that starts with six zeroes.
Notes
- Oh boy, bitcoin mining!
- Part Two is totally going to be something that takes forever if my algorithm isn't optimized
- Part Two takes ~15 seconds, which is not optimal, but more than acceptable