You're welcome and thanks for your kind words.
For sake of completeness, you should study iterative solutions such as DanillGodovan's one as they are also insanely fast/

it is allowed to go southwards, to 1, 22

Is it? There are no examples of curves or straights in the Kata description that suggest that is possible.

Congrats for persevering and getting it to work.

Maybe someone with some free time can help you debug your solution, but I don't have that luxury rn.

What exactly happens when you submit your solution? Does it return incorrect answers? Does it time out? Did you try to run it locally in your IDE with exactly the same inputs which it fails on Codewars? See here if you need to know how to recreate tests locally.

As @Chrono79 said, you're not supposed to scramble the digits. Otherwise, there's no way to obtain a unique solution.

You scramble numbers, not digits.

I'll start with the first example you provided.

String : 767483846971758281738077857079687872
L.Range: 18
More than one solution: [[68, 85], [69, 86]]
Solution: [68, 85]

Split the string up and show me how you get the range [69,86].

So the images in the Description didn't help at all?

the blob at 8,3 should move towards 9,6 because it's the first at that distance clockwise starting from h12

The blob at [ 5, 6 ] comes before [ 9, 6 ], clockwise.

For me, it's quite clear from description:

We can then assign a number to every word, based on where it falls in an alphabetically sorted list of all words made up of the same group of letters.

Woud it have any sense to have a list of words containing "AA" and "AA"? Also, are examples not explanatory enough?

ABAB = 2
BAAA = 4

Which of your two possible interpretations matches these examples?

This has already been discussed many times in the comments below, and all of the tests are correct. Not an issue.