In preparation for this year’s event I started to create a utility library and realized that I might not even need to care about decimal, or even fractional numbers, as I don’t remember ever encountering them while solving a problem so far. Does anyone have any examples for problems which required using floating point calculations? Is it maybe even explicitly stated that they are not needed? (I remember that Google Code Jam had some statistical problems where the solution didn’t have to be exact, just within an acceptable error margin, but that isn’t likely to happen here, right?)
AOC answers do need to be exact though, right? That implies integers only IMO, and I think that’s all I’ve ever seen… Not certain though.
They could use fixed point numbers instead of floating point ones. Fixed point is exact
I suppose they also don’t want to make it too difficult for people using languages without decimal support, like Javascript.