# AoC 2017 Day 12: Gridlock

### Source: Digital Plumber

Part 1: A network of nodes is defined by a list of lines formatted as such:

2 <-> 0, 3, 4


In this case, node 2 is connected to 0, 3, and 4 and vice versa.

How many nodes are in the group that contains the node 0?

nodes = set()
neighbors = collections.defaultdict(set)

for line in lib.input():
source, destinations = line.split('<->')
source = int(source.strip())

for destination in destinations.strip().split(','):
destination = int(destination.strip())

neighbors[destination].add(source)

Then, write a function that can take a node and recursively expand until it finds all nodes in the same group:

def find_group(node):
'''Yield all nodes that are connected to the given node.'''

visited = set()
q = queue.Queue()
q.put(node)

while not q.empty():
node = q.get()

if node in visited:
continue
else:

yield node

for neighbor in neighbors[node]:
q.put(neighbor)

This is enough to tell how big the group containing 0 is:

print('the group containing 0 has {} nodes'.format(len(list(find_group(0)))))

Part 2: How many groups are there?

This is slightly more interesting since we don’t want to count a group twice if we start from two different nodes in the same group. Mostly though, we will iterate through all the nodes and add 1 to our count if the new node is not one we’ve seen before than record all nodes in that same group:

visited = set()
groups = []

for node in nodes:
if node in visited:
continue

group = set(find_group(node))
groups.append(group)
visited |= group

print('there are {} groups'.format(len(groups)))

Since we are working with sets, the | operator is a setwise or, it will include nodes in either group. |= will add any nodes in group to visited that aren’t already there. Since we’re only looking for new groups, they will never overlap, but | still works. Plus, it amuses me somewhat to use the pipe operator.

All together:

$python3 run-all.py day-12 day-12 python3 gridlock.py input.txt 0.12310385704040527 the group containing 0 has 115 nodes; there are 221 groups As a fun aside, you could use [GraphViz]() to visualize the graph. First, generate a graph file with Python: lib.add_argument('--visualize', default = False, help = 'Filename to write a graphviz file to for visualization') if lib.param('visualize'): with open(lib.param('visualize'), 'w') as fout: fout.write('graph {\n') for node in nodes: for neighbor in neighbors[node]: fout.write(' {} -- {}\n'.format(node, neighbor)) fout.write('}') Then use one of the layout engines to render it. neato gave me the best results: $ python3 gridlock.py input.txt --visualize graph.dot
$neato -Tpng < graph.dot > graph.png$ open graph.png