calorie counting

approach

the input is split on blank lines and each group of numbers is summed, giving one total per elf. the totals are sorted once.

part 1 is the last element of the sorted list. part 2 is the sum of the last three.

there is a rust port that does the same with split on empty lines, and a go version that was left half-written: it uses an undeclared variable and has a stray bracket, so it doesn't compile.

the trick

sort the group totals once and both answers are slices off the end.

text = "".join(stdin)
groups = [sum(map(int, g.splitlines())) for g in text.split("\n\n")]

groups.sort()

# part1
print(groups[-1])

# part2
print(sum(groups[-3:]))