AoC 2020 - Day 24: Lobby Layout

Another nice one.
I should have googled immediately for a good approach, because all my initial approaches were quite worthless; yet I think that I learned something good. BTW: the linked resource is definitely a trove of information, and I should have some reading about it. Also, I suspect they had quite a hit in traffic today :)

I used a cube coordinates approach, and then coding the solution was quite straightforward. The second part, with the variant on Conway’s game of life, was also quite straightforward, but it took me some time to optimize it almost 20x from the initial 20 seconds.
Some interesting performance notes from the exercise:

• [x for x in Enum] is very expensive. Changing it to a precalculated list made a huge difference in performance
• lre_cache is somehow disappointing. I like that I can add memoization with a single line of code, yet I would expect better gains. Maybe I have wrong expectations.

Also, I really like today’s implementation of the game. It’s much cleaner (still maintaining the same performance) and express the rules in a better way. Maybe I should rewrite day 17 with this approach.
Parsing could be better, but it works, and I do not want to spend more time on that.