Advent of Code 2023
Master post of Advent of Code for 2023Updated · 2023-12-05 | Published · 2023-12-02
This is my Advent of Code master post for 2023! I know it's already day 2, but I just had the idea so I'm doing it now. What's the purpouse of this master post? What is a "master post?" Well, basically, I'll be placing my solutions for each AOC puzzle here, and updating the same blog post as I go. I'll walk through the steps I took to arrive at the solution, and some things I may have learned along the way. Hopefully, it'll turn out useful for someone somewhere.
Day 1
Part One
Part one was, for the most part, pretty straight forward. Find all the ditigs and put the first and last digits together to make a number, then add all of those numbers.
First, I extracted the numbers using the regex package, and returned them in a list.
def get_numbers(line):
return regex.findall(r"\d", line)
Easy peasy. Just use the \d regex pattern to match any digit. Next, we needed to combine the first and last digits into a single digit. This was a simple one-liner that indexed the first and last elements in the list of found digits and added them together as strings, then cast them back to int.
def combine_digits(digits):
return int(str(digits[0] + digits[-1]))
Getting the solution was a simple for loop over all the lines, running them through both of the previous functions to get what I needed, then adding the resulting numbers to another list, which was passed into sum().
with open("input.txt") as input:
digits = []
for line in input:
digits.append(combine_digits(get_numbers(line)))
print(sum(digits))
Part one, completed.
Part Two
The second part was a bit more complicated. Now, in addition to extracting the digits in order, we also needed to extract the numbers that were spelled out in the string. Ultimately, I landed on using regex again, however there was a consideration for overlapping number words, in additon to the digits. Luckily, the regex library had another function to use with an argument that considered overlapping results.
def get_numbers(line):
matches = list(re.finditer(r"[0-9?]|(one|two|three|four|five|six|seven|eight|nine)", line, overlapped=True))
return [str(matches[0].group(0)), str(matches[-1].group(0))]
Our get_numbers() function changed a bit. Firstly, we're using the finditer() method instead of findall(), which comes with a neat little flag that will also return overlapping results. There were many instances of stuff like oneight or twone in the input strings that were hard to catch and kind of a subtle challenge. The regex itself now includes [0-9?] to find each single digit, or (|) one of the nine word numbers. The return now has to call the group(0) index of the Match objects found and returned by the method, which are the string literals of what we're looking for.
Next, I made a quick and dirty substitution from the word numbers to their digits using a dict lookup:
def sub_string(str):
num_dict = {
'one': '1',
'two': '2',
'three': '3',
'four': '4',
'five': '5',
'six': '6',
'seven': '7',
'eight': '8',
'nine': '9',
'zero': '0',
}
return num_dict[str]
Then, we pass the found pairs into a function to determine what are the words, what are the digits, and use the same string-adding-then-cast-to-int trick we did earlier.
def to_int(pair):
ints = []
for num in pair:
if len(num) > 1:
ints.append(sub_string(num))
else:
ints.append(num)
return int(str(ints[0] + ints[-1]))
Now we loop over it all, same as before, and profit.
with open("input.txt") as input:
results = []
for line in input:
results.append(to_int(get_numbers(line)))
print(sum(results))
Day 2
Part One
This one had my brain rolling at first, but then after understanding how the data needed to be structured, it was fairly simple. First, we pulled the results of the game from each line in the input file.
def get_results(line):
return line.split(": ")[1].split("; ")
This function splits the line at the single colon, then returns a list from another split on the ;, which represents each result of the game.
Next, we examine each of the results and run it through a function that uses the match keyword to test each color's result against a pre-defined constant, and returs if the result is possible or not.
RED = 12
GREEN = 13
BLUE = 14
def checkif_possible(pair):
is_possible = True
quant = int(pair[0])
match pair[1].rstrip():
case "red":
if quant > RED:
is_possible = False
case "green":
if quant > GREEN:
is_possible = False
case "blue":
if quant > BLUE:
is_possible = False
case _:
raise ValueError("Not a color")
return is_possible
The default case statement here actually exposed a subtle problem in the input data; some of the strings contained \n characters in them which caused the match to default, which raised the ValueError(). Because of this, I added the rstrip() method on the match input to get rid of these, so we could match on everything.
Now, we build the main loop, and a quick little function to extract the Game ID number, then sum() all the IDs we pull from the loop.
def get_id(game):
return int(game.split(": ")[0].split(" ")[1])
with open("input.txt") as input:
all_games = []
for line in input:
results = get_results(line)
game_is_possible = True
for result in results:
for pair in result.split(", "):
if not checkif_possible(pair.split(" ")):
game_is_possible = False
break
if game_is_possible:
all_games.append(get_id(line))
print(sum(all_games))
Part Two
This one was trickier, but my issue with it actually came down to a misunderstanding of how Python uses the += opperator on strings, and my mistake of not casting the types for the digits right away.
So the first things I did was extract each of the results of each line into a dict with the keys set to the colors, and the values set to all the results of that color.
def order_results(results):
ordered_results = {
"red": [],
"blue": [],
"green": []
}
for result in results:
for pair in result.split(", "):
ordered_results[pair.split(" ")[1].rstrip()].append(int(pair.split(" ")[0]))
return ordered_results
Now that we've organized all of the results for each color, we need to find the largest result of each color, for each game, and multiply those results together, and throw that result into a list.
from functools import reduce
def find_largest(results):
return int(max(results))
def get_power(results):
return reduce(lambda x, y: x*y, results)
with open("input.txt") as input:
all_power = []
for line in input:
current_results = []
for color, results in order_results(line.split(": ")[1].split("; ")).items():
current_results.append(find_largest(results))
all_power.append(get_power(current_results))
print(sum(all_power))
At the end there, we take the list of power results we've built and add them all together, producing our result. Voila, the answer.
Day 3
Part One
This one really threw me for a loop. I only realized at the tail end of my head-banging that this is effectively navigating and operating on a matrix; had I thought of it this way earlier, I would have looked at NumPy's Matrix class, and probably would have had an easier time.
Firstly, I wanted to represent the numbers we're concerned with by using a Number class.
class Number:
position: (int, int)
num: int
line: str
is_part: bool
match: re.Match
def __init__(self, x, y, num, line, match):
self.position = (x, y)
self.num = num
self.line = line
self.is_part = False
self.match = match
def get_len(self):
return int(len(self.num))
def get_position(self):
return self.position
def get_x(self):
return self.position[0]
def get_y(self):
return self.position[1]
def is_start(self):
if self.position[0] == 0:
return True
else:
return False
def is_end(self):
if self.match.end() == len(self.line):
return True
else:
return False
When parsing the input (using regex again, I'll get to that), we'll be building this class using any number we find. The class will contain the information regarding the number, where it's at in the matrix, what the number is, what its length is, and the actual Match object returned from the regex method.
We'll use this method to find the numbers:
def find_numbers(line, index):
regex = re.compile(r"\d+")
numbers = []
for i in regex.finditer(line):
if i is not None:
numbers.append(Number(i.start(), index, i.group(), line, i))
return numbers
After we've found a number, we add it to a list:
with open("input.txt") as input:
lines = defaultdict(str)
index = 0
all_numbers = []
for line in input:
lines[index] += line.rstrip()
index += 1
for index, line in lines.items():
all_numbers += find_numbers(line, index)
Once we have our list, we'll run through it and check all the adjacent indices for any non-\d and non-\. characters, and change the is_part attribute of our class to True. We also need to account for where the number exists on the line in the matrix, because our checks will be slightly different for [0] and [-1] indexed numbers.
def check_adjacent(num, lines):
range = ()
if num.get_x() == 0:
range = (num.get_x(), num.get_x() + len(num.num) + 1)
elif num.is_end():
range = (num.get_x() - 1, num.get_x() + len(num.num))
else:
range = (num.get_x() - 1, num.get_x() + len(num.num) + 1)
regex = re.compile(r"[^\d\.]")
for line in lines:
results = regex.finditer(line, pos=range[0], endpos=range[1])
for result in results:
if result is not None:
num.is_part = True
Fetching the adjacent lines to check is similar, so we check the index attribute of the class and compare it to our matrix's y axis (which is a dict, with each key being the line number, and each value being that line, so key=y, and value=x), to check for the first and last lines, so we don't get an indexing error.
After all the collection, math, and headaches, we then add up the numbers who's is_part is true by pushing them to a list, and running the sum(parts) method, pooping out the answer!
with open("input.txt") as input:
lines = defaultdict(str)
index = 0
all_numbers = []
parts = []
for line in input:
lines[index] += line.rstrip()
index += 1
for index, line in lines.items():
all_numbers += find_numbers(line, index)
for num in all_numbers:
adjacent_lines = []
adjacent_lines.append(num.line)
if num.get_y() == 0:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() + 1])
elif num.get_y() == len(lines) - 1:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() - 1])
else:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() - 1])
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() + 1])
check_adjacent(num, adjacent_lines)
if num.is_part:
parts.append(int(num.num))
print(sum(parts), parts)
Here's the final result:
import re
from collections import defaultdict
class Number:
position: (int, int)
num: int
line: str
is_part: bool
match: re.Match
def __init__(self, x, y, num, line, match):
self.position = (x, y)
self.num = num
self.line = line
self.is_part = False
self.match = match
def get_len(self):
return int(len(self.num))
def get_position(self):
return self.position
def get_x(self):
return self.position[0]
def get_y(self):
return self.position[1]
def is_start(self):
if self.position[0] == 0:
return True
else:
return False
def is_end(self):
if self.match.end() == len(self.line):
return True
else:
return False
def check_adjacent(num, lines):
range = ()
if num.get_x() == 0:
range = (num.get_x(), num.get_x() + len(num.num) + 1)
elif num.is_end():
range = (num.get_x() - 1, num.get_x() + len(num.num))
else:
range = (num.get_x() - 1, num.get_x() + len(num.num) + 1)
regex = re.compile(r"[^\d\.]")
for line in lines:
results = regex.finditer(line, pos=range[0], endpos=range[1])
for result in results:
if result is not None:
num.is_part = True
def find_numbers(line, index):
regex = re.compile(r"\d+")
numbers = []
for i in regex.finditer(line):
if i is not None:
numbers.append(Number(i.start(), index, i.group(), line, i))
return numbers
with open("input.txt") as input:
lines = defaultdict(str)
index = 0
all_numbers = []
parts = []
for line in input:
lines[index] += line.rstrip()
index += 1
for index, line in lines.items():
all_numbers += find_numbers(line, index)
for num in all_numbers:
adjacent_lines = []
adjacent_lines.append(num.line)
if num.get_y() == 0:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() + 1])
elif num.get_y() == len(lines) - 1:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() - 1])
else:
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() - 1])
adjacent_lines.append(lines[num.get_y() + 1])
check_adjacent(num, adjacent_lines)
if num.is_part:
parts.append(int(num.num))
print(sum(parts), parts)