omg the transform lambada

as drgaur said "a lot of circle geometry, tangent lines, circle intersections" as well as path finding of course

what math is involved here

How?? what im missing here

BIO stands for "British Informatics Olympiad". Type that in instead.

I tried that at first but no it's not fast enough. The solution is mathematical but the logic behind it is derived from pattern spotting. I recommend looking at the mark scheme for this question in BIO 2017, that helped me solve this.

the solution is so elegant it's as if this kata was framed around the solution.

i tried that approach and found that it's not possible to generate 10^10 primes in the time given. you should use a wikipedia page that discusses what the kata is about.

I'd be very grateful @monadius

Here's some help. Imagine these instructions were given to a robot, how would a robot interpret these instructions to move to a required position? As MrCookies78 has said, the position of the robot isn't reset between function calls. If you're using python you can type "Ctrl + Enter" instead of "Enter" to run all the tests, giving you more tests to look at to test your theories.

problems like this are good because it introduces users to mathematical optimisation, which comes up later in programming

this was genius

if you look up the (connect the ropes to minimise cost) it is much better explained there and will remove confusion because many people think for numbers [1,2,3,4,5] the minimal cost is 34 but it is actually 33'