Advent of Code

  0.0.0.0:2019

--- Day 14: Space Stoichiometry ---

As you approach the rings of Saturn, your ship's low fuel indicator turns on. There isn't any fuel here, but the rings have plenty of raw material. Perhaps your ship's Inter-Stellar Refinery Union brand nanofactory can turn these raw materials into fuel.

You ask the nanofactory to produce a list of the reactions it can perform that are relevant to this process (your puzzle input). Every reaction turns some quantities of specific input chemicals into some quantity of an output chemical. Almost every chemical is produced by exactly one reaction; the only exception, ORE, is the raw material input to the entire process and is not produced by a reaction.

You just need to know how much ORE you'll need to collect before you can produce one unit of FUEL.

Each reaction gives specific quantities for its inputs and output; reactions cannot be partially run, so only whole integer multiples of these quantities can be used. (It's okay to have leftover chemicals when you're done, though.) For example, the reaction 1 A, 2 B, 3 C => 2 D means that exactly 2 units of chemical D can be produced by consuming exactly 1 A, 2 B and 3 C. You can run the full reaction as many times as necessary; for example, you could produce 10 D by consuming 5 A, 10 B, and 15 C.

Suppose your nanofactory produces the following list of reactions:

10 ORE => 10 A
1 ORE => 1 B
7 A, 1 B => 1 C
7 A, 1 C => 1 D
7 A, 1 D => 1 E
7 A, 1 E => 1 FUEL

The first two reactions use only ORE as inputs; they indicate that you can produce as much of chemical A as you want (in increments of 10 units, each 10 costing 10 ORE) and as much of chemical B as you want (each costing 1 ORE). To produce 1 FUEL, a total of 31 ORE is required: 1 ORE to produce 1 B, then 30 more ORE to produce the 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 = 28 A (with 2 extra A wasted) required in the reactions to convert the B into C, C into D, D into E, and finally E into FUEL. (30 A is produced because its reaction requires that it is created in increments of 10.)

Or, suppose you have the following list of reactions:

9 ORE => 2 A
8 ORE => 3 B
7 ORE => 5 C
3 A, 4 B => 1 AB
5 B, 7 C => 1 BC
4 C, 1 A => 1 CA
2 AB, 3 BC, 4 CA => 1 FUEL

The above list of reactions requires 165 ORE to produce 1 FUEL:

Here are some larger examples:

Given the list of reactions in your puzzle input, what is the minimum amount of ORE required to produce exactly 1 FUEL?

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