Python Memory Management and Tips Transcripts
Chapter: Efficient data structures
Lecture: Cycle busting with friend map
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0:00
Alright, we're gonna bring some cool stuff together, and we're going to solve this problem by using a new data structure for our friends.
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Alright, so what I want to do is I want to create a data structure whose job is to manage the relationships. So that thing will exist
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and it'll hold on to say, p1 and p2, and it will know that we should point from p1 to 2 or 2 to 3 or 3 to 1,
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or whatever the relationship is. And then when we're done using them, we can say "we're done with this person",
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and it can drop all of those references. And actually, you'll see, It won't even really need to do that to work correctly.
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So I'm gonna call this data structure a "friend map". Now, at the heart of this is we're gonna have a thing
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I'm gonna call a "map", but notice that's a function. So we can call it "mp" or whatever,
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but I also want it to not actually be directly manipulatable from the outside.
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And so we can do that in Python by putting a double underscore and then it'll effectively be hidden. So this, I'm gonna have some help here,
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so this is gonna be a dictionary of, given an integer, this is the user id, it's gonna return a list, which is one of these, and same for dictionary.
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So given a person id, like 1, 7 or 500 or whatever, return me a list of their friends. And a dictionary would be fine,
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but I would like to also have the case when you ask for somebody who we've not entered or dealt with yet, to just say "no, no friends for that person".
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So we'll just say "defaultdict" rather than a regular dictionary. And it's going to be calling the list function when it finds a missing item.
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So, for example, nothing's added yet, right? If I asked for a map of 5, 6 or whatever it is, that's going to return
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an empty list and I could even append to that without crashing, without a key error or any of that kind of stuff.
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So default dicts are cool. This is hidden, so we're gonna write a few functions to deal with this. First of all, let's add a friend relationship here,
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so I'll say "def add_friend, and we'll have a person, a person like this. We'll go ahead and import them over there. We'll have a friend,
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which is also a person". Super. So we're gonna say "here's the person, here's their friend, set up their relationship so, you know, whoever that is,
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is the friend of this person". Pretty straightforward. But we want to do a little error checking, so if "not person or not friend"
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so you can't be a friend of none. You also, unless your little bit funky, you know, or maybe you always should be.
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Whatever, I don't know if you should be a friend of yourself. Right, you certainly don't need this thing to know whether you should be a friend
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of yourself. And then finally, we're gonna have a function down here "def is_friend", the exact same thing here that returns a bool.
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Alright, now return False. You've already set this relationship up, we don't need to do it as well. So "if is_friend (person, friend)" return.
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We don't need to enter them into this data structure twice. Alright, Now, here's where it gets interesting.
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So what we're gonna do is we're gonna say your current friends, the friends of person, not this one, but let's call it existing friends,
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existing friends or current friends, current. Current friends. So this relationship is stored over in the map, we'll go to the map
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and we'll get the friend id, so a person.id and remember if they've never set this up before,
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this is going to create an empty list for person.id and then we're gonna add them, or if it's already there, it's just going to return another list.
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Now, here's where it gets interesting. Do we just do this "append friend"? Well, if we do, we're kind of back in the same situation. Now,
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this thing, right, if we somehow forget to clean up the memory here, well, this thing is gonna hold our reference to friend,
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and it will never get cleaned up. That would be a bummer, right? So we're gonna do something a little bit different.
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We're going to go and add a weak reference. Remember, we just spoke about that, but we can use that here like this so we'll have the ability to get all
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the friends back for the friends who have not been cleaned up or deleted or vanished and the ones who have will be able to test
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"Oh, that person's already gone. They don't exist in the system anymore, so they're not really friends" alright?
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So what we can do is we can actually store this weak reference. But if you ask for the friends of somebody, yeah, you'll be able to just give it back.
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How cool is that? Okay, so this is going to let us add a friend and let's go and start by
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Fixing this here. We'll say "friend_map" and import that at the top. And we'll say, "add_friend", so p1 and p2 two and vice versa,
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like that. Now, down here, we have to change this. Instead of the p1 that's in here, we'll say "friend_map.is_friend"
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we're referencing p2 and the friend would be p1. So just like that. Now remember this one always returns false. We haven't finished this one. Yeah,
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p3. It goes like that. So, let's go ahead and run it and see what happens. Yes. Create some cycles. Are they friends? No. Because we said, just No.
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But notice there's no cycles found, okay? Well, that doesn't really prove anything yet.
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We haven't been able to accomplish the same relationships we wanted before,
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right? So, we're part way there. We're able to add these friends theoretically, and we haven't been able to test them,
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but we're getting there. So we're gonna have to write "is_friend", and it turns out that this function is not too bad.