Shashank Sabniveesu

Advent of code 2020 - Day 6 (Part 1)

Day - 6 Part 1 is quick! We need to count unique elements and sum the counts together. So a set it is

Attempt 1: Time Complexity O(n)

Here’s my __main__.py used to solve this challenge:

""" Program to determine the sum of unique questions across groups of persons

    Read every line, make it a set and union to existing group's set

    If a blank line is encountered, increment the sum_of_counts by the length of this set.
    Clear the set and proceed to next

    As the final set wouldn't have gotten processed, due to absence of blank line, process it outside the loop
"""
from processors import count, fill, reset


sum_of_counts = 0

with open('input-6.txt', 'r') as lines:
    for line in lines:
        if not line.split():
            sum_of_counts += count()
            reset()
        else:
            fill(line)

    sum_of_counts += count()
    reset()

print(sum_of_counts)

Here’re the processors.py module used:

""" Module to maintain counts of questions per person and reset them
"""
from containers import group_set
from os import linesep


def fill(person_string):
    """    Processes the person string to construct a new and union with an existing set
    """

    global group_set
    group_set = group_set.union(set(person_string))
    group_set.discard(linesep)
    # print(group_set)


def count():
    """    Returns the length of set filled for this group so far
    """

    global group_set
    return len(group_set)


def reset():
    """    Resets the set filled for a group
    """

    global group_set
    group_set = set()

Observe the usage of keyword global. Without it Python interpreter expects to have the variable group_set declared before accessing it i.e reading. Here we want to use the one defined already in containers.py module (shown next)

""" Module to maintain datastructures that hold questions per group

    We choose 'set' since we only need unique question count
"""


group_set = set()

Here’s the time taken in 3 consecutive runs:

shashank@shashank-HP-ENVY-Notebook:~/Projects/personal/programming-challenges/advent-of-code/2020/day-6$ time python3 part-1-attempt-1
6259

real    0m0.031s
user    0m0.031s
sys     0m0.000s
shashank@shashank-HP-ENVY-Notebook:~/Projects/personal/programming-challenges/advent-of-code/2020/day-6$ time python3 part-1-attempt-1
6259

real    0m0.051s
user    0m0.040s
sys     0m0.012s
shashank@shashank-HP-ENVY-Notebook:~/Projects/personal/programming-challenges/advent-of-code/2020/day-6$ time python3 part-1-attempt-1
6259

real    0m0.030s
user    0m0.023s
sys     0m0.008s
shashank@shashank-HP-ENVY-Notebook:~/Projects/personal/programming-challenges/advent-of-code/2020/day-6$ 

Do you have a better solution? Please Tweet your reply or Open an Issue referencing the title.

Lessons Learned

1. As we read from a file, despite appearing to be a plain string, there’s a line terminating character at the end to be taken care of
2. Python’s set offers discard() for remove() only if exists