Source: I Heard You Like Registers¹

Part 1: Given a set of registers initialized to 0, interpret a series of instruction of the form:

• {register} (inc|dec) {number|register} if {number|register} (<|<=|=|!=|=>|>) {number|register}

What is the largest value in any register?

In order to make the code here a bit more elegant, we’re going to want to use the operator module:

conditionals = {
    '<': operator.lt,
    '<=': operator.le,
    '==': operator.eq,
    '!=': operator.ne,
    '>=': operator.ge,
    '>': operator.gt,
}

Also, we want a helper function that can take either a number or register and return either that number or the value of that register²:

def val(x):
    try:
        return int(x)
    except:
        return registers[x]

Now that we have that, we can apply the commands. We’ll use regular expression to parse the inputs and apply the conditionals above:

registers = collections.defaultdict(lambda : 0)

for line in lib.input():
    register, mode, value, _, left, op, right = line.split()

    f = conditionals[op]

    if f(val(left), val(right)):
        if mode == 'inc':
            registers[register] += val(value)
        else:
            registers[register] -= val(value)

print(max(registers.values()))

If we didn’t have the operator module, we’d have a large if/elif/else block instead. I like this better; higher order functions are lovely.

Part 2: What is the largest value any register reaches during execution?

To track this, we just need to keep a variable that will track the max_register_value as we go:

max_register_value = 0
for line in lib.input():
    ...

    max_register_value = max(max_register_value, *registers.values())

print('maximums, final: {}, overall: {}'.format(
    max(registers.values()),
    max_register_value,
))

The * operator³ allows you to send each of the values in the registers into the max function as parameters, which is nice.

This is another case where there’s not much point in running the two parts individually:

$ python3 run-all.py day-08

day-08  python3 conditiputer.py input.txt       0.11300992965698242     maximums, final: 6012, overall: 6369