It's a bit overly clever. I am a huge fan of Peter Norvig (and he was once my skip-level boss), but I'd call this code out in a code review for being obtuse.

Notice that the input, `nums`, is a set. So he's taking the intersection of two sets. One set always has one item, so the result will be a collection with either 0 or 1 items.

It could have also been written as:

  first(x * (2020 - x)
        for x in nums
        if (2020 - x) in nums and x != (2020 - x))

But that has a lot of duplication, so it'd probably be best to just use an imperative approach here and do something like:

  def day1_1(nums):
    "Find 2 distinct numbers that sum to 2020, and return their product."
    for x in nums:
      y = 2020 - x

      if x == y:
        continue

      if y in nums:
        return x * y

when I saw the first() function, I thought it was some default python that was new to me.

But he defines it above in his commonly used functions:

    def first(iterable, default=None) -> object:
        "Return first item in iterable, or default."
        return next(iter(iterable), default)

How to tell he's a Lisper. :) Be glad it wasn't car().

madhadron, I'm a Common Lisper, so I'm good with `first` and `rest`.

I am not sure I would advocate for this but, from Python 3.8, this is an instance where assignment expressions could allow the first code without duplication.

    first(x * y
          for x in nums
          if (y := 2020 - x) in nums and x != y)

I agree, tuvistavie! But my default machine has 3.7 installed, and I didn't want to get too far ahead of readers. Sometime next year I'll go to 3.8, and look forward to using ":="

The "x == y" test looks like a bug to me, unless duplicate entries are not allowed. For example [1010,1010,1721,979,366,299,675,1456] should return 1010 * 1010, not 1721 * 299.

Given that the comment says "Find 2 distinct numbers that sum to 2020", I expect duplicate entries are not allowed.

Yes, but I cannot find the same in the problem definition:

"they need you to find the two entries that sum to 2020 and then multiply those two numbers together"

https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/1

There are frequently non-stated properties of the input in Advent of Code that simplify the problem a bit.

abstruse

Completely agree, your solution is more clear.

    def day1_1(nums):
        "Find 2 distinct numbers that sum to 2020, and return their product."
        return first(x * y 
                     for x in nums 
                     for y in nums & {2020 - x} 
                     if x != y)

`nums` is a set of integers `nums & {2020 - x}` Finds all the numbers that are in the set of `nums` and the set of `{2020 - x}` - this basically extracts a number, `y`, for which `x+y = 2020`.

So for each x in nums, he extracts a number from nums that, added to x, equals 2020. If there is such a number y, he checks if it is the same as x, and only if it is different, does he yield in his generator, as the product of y and x.

It's succint, but not exactly readable, imho.

{2020 - x} is a single item set. nums & {2020 - x} does set intersection with nums, which restricts nums to either the item that sums with x to 2020 or nothing if there is no such item in nums.