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- --- Day 4: Ceres Search ---
- "Looks like the Chief's not here. Next!" One of The Historians pulls out a device and pushes the only button on it. After a brief flash, you recognize the interior of the Ceres monitoring station!
- As the search for the Chief continues, a small Elf who lives on the station tugs on your shirt; she'd like to know if you could help her with her word search (your puzzle input). She only has to find one word: XMAS.
- This word search allows words to be horizontal, vertical, diagonal, written backwards, or even overlapping other words. It's a little unusual, though, as you don't merely need to find one instance of XMAS - you need to find all of them. Here are a few ways XMAS might appear, where irrelevant characters have been replaced with .:
- ..X...
- .SAMX.
- .A..A.
- XMAS.S
- .X....
- The actual word search will be full of letters instead. For example:
- MMMSXXMASM
- MSAMXMSMSA
- AMXSXMAAMM
- MSAMASMSMX
- XMASAMXAMM
- XXAMMXXAMA
- SMSMSASXSS
- SAXAMASAAA
- MAMMMXMMMM
- MXMXAXMASX
- In this word search, XMAS occurs a total of 18 times; here's the same word search again, but where letters not involved in any XMAS have been replaced with .:
- ....XXMAS.
- .SAMXMS...
- ...S..A...
- ..A.A.MS.X
- XMASAMX.MM
- X.....XA.A
- S.S.S.S.SS
- .A.A.A.A.A
- ..M.M.M.MM
- .X.X.XMASX
- Take a look at the little Elf's word search. How many times does XMAS appear?
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