You land at the regional airport in time for your next flight. In fact, it looks like you'll even have time to grab some food: all flights are currently delayed due to issues in luggage processing.
Due to recent aviation regulations, many rules (your puzzle input) are being enforced about bags and their contents; bags must be color-coded and must contain specific quantities of other color-coded bags. Apparently, nobody responsible for these regulations considered how long they would take to enforce!
For example, consider the following rules:
light red bags contain 1 bright white bag, 2 muted yellow bags.
dark orange bags contain 3 bright white bags, 4 muted yellow bags.
bright white bags contain 1 shiny gold bag.
muted yellow bags contain 2 shiny gold bags, 9 faded blue bags.
shiny gold bags contain 1 dark olive bag, 2 vibrant plum bags.
dark olive bags contain 3 faded blue bags, 4 dotted black bags.
vibrant plum bags contain 5 faded blue bags, 6 dotted black bags.
faded blue bags contain no other bags.
dotted black bags contain no other bags.
These rules specify the required contents for 9 bag types. In this example, every faded blue
bag is empty, every vibrant plum
bag contains 11 bags (5 faded blue
and 6 dotted black
), and so on.
You have a shiny gold bag. If you wanted to carry it in at least one other bag, how many different bag colors would be valid for the outermost bag? (In other words: how many colors can, eventually, contain at least one shiny gold
bag?)
In the above rules, the following options would be available to you:
- A
bright white
bag, which can hold yourshiny gold
bag directly. - A
muted yellow
bag, which can hold yourshiny gold
bag directly, plus some other bags. - A
dark orange
bag, which can holdbright white
andmuted yellow
bags, either of which could then hold yourshiny gold
bag. - A
light red
bag, which can holdbright white
andmuted yellow
bags, either of which could then hold yourshiny gold
bag.
So, in this example, the number of bag colors that can eventually contain at least one shiny gold
bag is 4.
How many bag colors can eventually contain at least one shiny gold
bag? (The list of rules is quite long; make sure you get all of it.)
It's getting pretty expensive to fly these days - not because of ticket prices, but because of the ridiculous number of bags you need to buy!
Consider again your shiny gold
bag and the rules from the above example:
faded blue
bags contain0
other bags.dotted black
bags contain0
other bags.vibrant plum
bags contain11
other bags: 5faded blue
bags and 6dotted black
bags.dark olive
bags contain7
other bags: 3faded blue
bags and 4dotted black
bags.
So, a single shiny gold
bag must contain 1 dark olive
bag (and the 7 bags within it) plus 2 vibrant plum
bags (and the 11 bags within each of those): 1 + 1*7 + 2 + 2*11
= 32 bags!
Of course, the actual rules have a small chance of going several levels deeper than this example; be sure to count all of the bags, even if the nesting becomes topologically impractical!
Here's another example:
shiny gold bags contain 2 dark red bags.
dark red bags contain 2 dark orange bags.
dark orange bags contain 2 dark yellow bags.
dark yellow bags contain 2 dark green bags.
dark green bags contain 2 dark blue bags.
dark blue bags contain 2 dark violet bags.
dark violet bags contain no other bags.
In this example, a single shiny gold
bag must contain 126 other bags.
How many individual bags are required inside your single shiny gold
bag?