Picat Through the Lens of Advent of Code

Picat is a logic-based, multi-paradigm programming language that integrates features from logic, functional, constraint, and imperative programming paradigms. This paper presents solutions to several problems from the 2024 Advent of Code (AoC). While AoC problems are not designed for any specific programming language, certain problem types, such as reverse engineering and path-finding, are particularly well-suited to Picat due to its built-in constraint solving, pattern matching, backtracking, and dynamic programming with tabling. This paper demonstrates that Picat’s features, especially its SAT-based constraint solving and tabling, enable concise, declarative, and highly efficient implementations of problems that would require significantly more effort in imperative languages.