just imagine Siri or Alexa in its childhood ^^

all desired cases seem to be covered explicilty

hmm.. i think you need to get some undrstanding of pass by value / pass by reference in general. And how it works in python.

You can check something like this: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/pass-by-reference-vs-value-in-python/

Hope you'll answer your own questions after this =)

totally unreadable, but i like it =))

aw, i see. You can try. I'm not familiar with php anyway. Sorry

hm..what do you mean? seems like tests are exist..

You should always try to analyze the simplest case, just split difficult problem into easy, trivial cases and after that add more and more logic and abstractness on each new step...

Please, use unsigned ints due to the fact of impossibility to have negative number of beads =)

agree )
thnx

@Unnamed, yep, i agree about non-negative nubmer of objects. It's more logical to correct the test cases.

Of course i'm not about the tech solution, but description...

But in the description we have if less then 2, simply return 0. So, should we care about negatives (even it's a bit unreal)?

check what happens with you x.
You are missing one letter.

welcome