Felt a little hard for 6 kyu. Did anyone manage to do it without memorizing results?

It would have been a fun kata if it hadn't been for the unclear definition of spiral.

Solved it :) Thanks for the explanation!

Can you do B -> A -> B -> G to get (BAG), would that count as part of input(B, 3)? If you can't what is the restriction, you can't traverse the same path? In this case I can go from B -> A but I can't turn back to using the path A -> B.

The combinations part is confusing, does (BDG) and (BGD) count as 1 or 2?

Thanks! Maybe I'll have a lightbulb moment later, really enjoyable kata nonetheless.

I was timing out so I asked my function to return an arbitrary number without any additional computation, just to do that it took over 8 seconds. Is our algo supposed to run in under 4 seconds? (Python 3.6)

Is there a trick to this? I built sort of the brute force solution (checking a ton of different paths) with optimizations along the way, it works fine but it's timing out.

Should I continue to make optimizations with tons of different cases or is there one neat trick(s) which I'm missing?

No need to spoil the trick, I think a yes/no answer is not a spoiler.

Can we do a brute force solution? My code runs fine but it times out after about 48 tests.

I thought the problem was timing out but the page just freezes.

For python, I think as long as the ouput is a list it should be able to run the tests so I asked the function to return [n] to see if there were big numbers in the test but the page just froze. My solution works fine for the sample tests.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.