You can substitute your first loop to find the highest power with a log₃ function.

Why not if 'loses' in string?

Even better--it's O(1)!

beautiful

Awesome! I had a lot of fun exploring a recursive solution, and even made it into a one-liner!

I can't believe those one-liners actually work!

There's currently only one test case, so my static solution passed...

I don't understand why this isn't a function--the whole point is that I shouldn't have to guess what kind of variables I have to work with. I even submitted a solution answer = 29 which submitted after a couple tries.

No need to add 1 to the max value of range(), since the upper bound is guaranteed not to be in the result.

Agreed that this inconcsistency is annoying. I had to make a special case for '0=0' even though the same kind of logic (at least in Python) generates '0 = 0'

So, did I do this right?

I'm not sure what the intention is here: this will still throw an IndexError if len(a) < 2...

My solution shouldn't have passed :)

My comment was for Python, not JS.