Advent of code - Day 7

Objective

Given a list of integers, make them all the same in the fewest moves possible

Sample input

16,1,2,0,4,2,7,1,2,14

This means there's a crab with horizontal position 16, a crab with horizontal position 1, and so on. The point to which the crabs should all move which would result in the minimum moves for all is 2

For the solution, we start at the minimum position, then check the sum of the moves for all crabs.

We shouldn't check every position, instead we stop the loop at either the mean or the middle of the list

from statistics import mean

def day7_1(positions):
    target = max((len(positions) // 2) + 1, int(mean(positions)) + 1)
    return min([
        sum([abs(crab - p)
             for crab in positions]
            )
        for p in range(min(positions), target)])


def day7_2(positions):
    target = max((len(positions) // 2) + 1, int(mean(positions)) + 1)
    return min([
        sum([sum(range(abs(crab - p) + 1))
             for crab in positions]
            )
        for p in range(min(positions), target)]