Advent of Code - Day 7

Analyze your manifold diagram.

Part 1

Provided the following diagram with the beam moving down from the S, how many times will the beam be split?

.......S.......
...............
.......^.......
...............
......^.^......
...............
.....^.^.^.....
...............
....^.^...^....
...............
...^.^...^.^...
...............
..^...^.....^..
...............
.^.^.^.^.^...^.
...............

I bruteforced this one by validating an incoming beam above each of the splitters and counting that value. I generated the entire diagram and then rewalked each value to complete the count.

Part 2

For this part we needed to calculate the total number of possible paths. I’m creating a grid with path counts and increasing the count every time the splitter is encountered.

for i in Lines[1:]:
    for col in range(len(curr)):
        if curr[col] > 0 and i[col] == '^':
            p2 += curr[col]
            curr[col-1] += curr[col]
            curr[col+1] += curr[col]
            curr[col] = 0

I spent a lot of time doing something similar to this but needed some help switching the grid to a count versus tallying things in separate variables. This is a much cleaner approach which I like.

There were some fun animations of this happening in the subreddit.