human
Give me a a in the first iteration given the following:
I am working on the file "Section 2 - Advance Python/Chapter S2.01 - Functional Programming/03_map_reduce_and_filter.ipynb".
The first task is:
In the above example, x is the current iterated item and a is the accumulator. 
It is the value returned by the execution of the lambda on the previous item. reduce() walks through the items. For each one, it runs the lambda on the current a and x and returns the result as the a of the next iteration.
What is a in the first iteration? There is no previous iteration result for it to pass along. reduce() uses the first item in the collection for a in the first iteration and starts iterating at the second item. That is, the first x is the second item.
This code counts how often the word 'the' appears in a list of strings:
Can you write Python code for it?
assistant
#Here is a in the first iteration.

sentences = ['Copy the variable assignment for our new empty list'
             'Copy the expression that we’ve been append-ing into this new list'
             'Copy the for loop line, excluding the final'
             'Copy the if statement line, also without the']

count = 0
for sentence in sentences:
    count += sentence.count('the')

print(count)

help(reduce)

# # This is the same code written as a reduce:

# ### NOT WORKING
# from functools import reduce

# def countme(x):
#     print(x)
#     print("*" * 20)
#     return x.count('the')
    
# sentences = ['Copy the variable assignment for our new empty list'
#              'Copy the expression that we’ve been append-ing into this new list'
#              'Copy the for loop line, excluding the final'
#              'Copy the if statement line, also without the']

# sam_count = reduce(countme,
#                    sentences)
# print(sam_count)

import random

colours = ["pink", "purple", "black", "yellow", "purple", "indego", "white", "peach"]

def foo(counter, i):
  colour = random.choice(colours)
  try:
    counter[colour] += 1
  except KeyError:
    counter[colour] = 1
  return counter

counts = reduce(foo, range(1, 50), {})
print(counts)