Dec 10, 2020

AoC 2020 - Day 10: Adapter Array

Again a short puzzle, but this time a satisfying one.

First part was solvable using only python batteries (plus pairwise itertool recipe): sorted, pairwise, counter.
Second part was solvable again using python batteries and a dynamic programming approach.
Note that without memoization the solution would have taken ages; this is something even the description was hinting at.

This is the first time I am using functools.cached, and I was in for a couple of surprises:

cached is available since 3.9 (I am still using 3.8), even if it’s already in 3.8 libs. Prior version can use the slightly more expensive alternative, functools.lru_cache, with maxsize=None and have the same effect.
It is not possible to specify a key for the cache a nd the entire argument tuple is used as a key for the cache.
This was something a bit surprising for me, and it forced me to pass a couple of (fortunately read-only) parameters as global objects.