Here is how I broke this down:

1. We need to read the first line of input to get it out of the way (it can be used to write a parser for the next line, but it isn't useful)

n = raw_input()

1. Read in the second line -- this is just a single string ex. '1 2 3 4'

input_line = raw_input()

1. Split the string by whitespace into a list

input_list = input_line.split()

• Note: This is a list of strings ex. ['1', '2', '3', '4'] But we want a list of integers ex. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  1. We need to convert the list elements from strings to ints
• [Simple] Option 1 (since we know the number of elements, n):

    for i in xrange(n):
        input_list[i] = int(input_list[i])

• [Simple] Option 2 (if we are ignoring the first input line for some reason):

    for i in xrange(len(input_list)):
        input_list[i] = int(input_list[i])

• [More Advanced] Option 3:

    input_list = map(int, input_list)

• [More Advanced] Option 4 (List composition):

    input_list = [int(x) for x in input_list]

Now input_list looks like this: [1, 2, 3, 4]

1. We need to convert our list of ints to a tuple of ints (as a list is not hashable, but a tuple is)

t = tuple(input_list)

1. print the result

print hash(t)

Other Optimizations (Not necessary for credit here):

• If the first input line == '0' then bail, there isn't anything interesting to parse
• Call strip() on the input to remove trailing and leading whitespace.

raw_input().strip()

• These commands can obviously be combined