Packet Scanners — Haskell — #adventofcode Day 13

Series

This post is part of the series Advent of Code 2017

🗂️ Technology 🗂️ Learning 🗂️ Advent of Code 🗂️ Haskell

Series: Advent of Code 2017

Today’s challenge requires us to sneak past a firewall made up of a series of scanners.

→ Full code on GitHub

!!! commentary I wasn’t really thinking straight when I solved this challenge. I got a solution without too much trouble, but I ended up simulating the step-by-step movement of the scanners.

I finally realised that I could calculate whether or not a given scanner was safe at a given time directly with modular arithmetic, and it bugged me so much that I reimplemented the solution. Both are given below, the faster one first.

First we introduce some standard library stuff and define some useful utilities.

module Main where

import qualified Data.Text as T
import Data.Maybe (mapMaybe)

strip :: String -> String
strip = T.unpack . T.strip . T.pack

splitOn :: String -> String -> [String]
splitOn sep = map T.unpack . T.splitOn (T.pack sep) . T.pack

parseScanner :: String -> (Int, Int)
parseScanner s = (d, r)
  where [d, r] = map read $ splitOn ": " s

traverseFW does all the hard work: it checks for each scanner whether or not it’s safe as we pass through, and returns a list of the severities of each time we’re caught. mapMaybe is like the standard map in many languages, but operates on a list of Haskell Maybe values, like a combined map and filter. If the value is Just x, x gets included in the returned list; if the value is Nothing, then it gets thrown away.

traverseFW :: Int -> [(Int, Int)] -> [Int]
traverseFW delay = mapMaybe caught
  where
    caught (d, r) = if (d + delay) `mod` (2*(r-1)) == 0
      then Just (d * r)
      else Nothing

Then the total severity of our passage through the firewall is simply the sum of each individual severity.

severity :: [(Int, Int)] -> Int
severity = sum . traverseFW 0

But we don’t want to know how badly we got caught, we want to know how long to wait before setting off to get through safely. findDelay tries traversing the firewall with increasing delay, and returns the delay for the first pass where we predict not getting caught.

findDelay :: [(Int, Int)] -> Int
findDelay scanners = head $ filter (null . flip traverseFW scanners) [0..]

And finally, we put it all together and calculate and print the result.

main = do
  scanners <- fmap (map parseScanner . lines) getContents

  putStrLn $ "Severity: " ++ (show $ severity scanners)
  putStrLn $ "Delay: " ++ (show $ findDelay scanners)

I’m not generally bothered about performance for these challenges, but here I’ll note that my second attempt runs in a little under 2 seconds on my laptop:

$ time ./13-packet-scanners-redux < 13-input.txt
Severity: 1900
Delay: 3966414
./13-packet-scanners-redux < 13-input.txt  1.73s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 1.754 total

Compare that with the first, simulation-based one, which takes nearly a full minute:

$ time ./13-packet-scanners < 13-input.txt
Severity: 1900
Delay: 3966414
./13-packet-scanners < 13-input.txt  57.63s user 0.27s system 100% cpu 57.902 total

And for good measure, here’s the code. Notice the tick and tickOne functions, which together simulate moving all the scanners by one step; for this to work we have to track the full current state of each scanner, which is easier to read with a Haskell record-based custom data type. traverseFW is more complicated because it has to drive the simulation, but the rest of the code is mostly the same.

module Main where

import qualified Data.Text as T
import Control.Monad (forM_)

data Scanner = Scanner { depth :: Int
                       , range :: Int
                       , pos :: Int
                       , dir :: Int }
instance Show Scanner where
  show (Scanner d r p dir) = show d ++ "/" ++ show r ++ "/" ++ show p ++ "/" ++ show dir

strip :: String -> String
strip = T.unpack . T.strip . T.pack

splitOn :: String -> String -> [String]
splitOn sep str = map T.unpack $ T.splitOn (T.pack sep) $ T.pack str

parseScanner :: String -> Scanner
parseScanner s = Scanner d r 0 1
  where [d, r] = map read $ splitOn ": " s

tickOne :: Scanner -> Scanner
tickOne (Scanner depth range pos dir)
  | pos <= 0         = Scanner depth range (pos+1) 1
  | pos >= range - 1 = Scanner depth range (pos-1) (-1)
  | otherwise        = Scanner depth range (pos+dir) dir

tick :: [Scanner] -> [Scanner]
tick = map tickOne

traverseFW :: [Scanner] -> [(Int, Int)]
traverseFW = traverseFW' 0
  where
    traverseFW' _ [] = []
    traverseFW' layer scanners@((Scanner depth range pos _):rest)
      -- | layer == depth && pos == 0  = (depth*range) + (traverseFW' (layer+1) $ tick rest)
      | layer == depth && pos == 0  = (depth,range) : (traverseFW' (layer+1) $ tick rest)
      | layer == depth && pos /= 0  = traverseFW' (layer+1) $ tick rest
      | otherwise                   = traverseFW' (layer+1) $ tick scanners

severity :: [Scanner] -> Int
severity = sum . map (uncurry (*)) . traverseFW

empty :: [a] -> Bool
empty [] = True
empty _ = False
  
findDelay :: [Scanner] -> Int
findDelay scanners = delay
  where
    (delay, _) = head $ filter (empty . traverseFW . snd) $ zip [0..] $ iterate tick scanners
    

main = do
  scanners <- fmap (map parseScanner . lines) getContents

  putStrLn $ "Severity: " ++ (show $ severity scanners)
  putStrLn $ "Delay: " ++ (show $ findDelay scanners)

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