As of writing this, 181000ish completions of this kata, at almost 9 years old and after ALL of that scrutiny, a lone code wolf FINALLY cracked the secret, that the tests are wrong.

Thanks for your feedback, I will take it on board. As a side note , this kata is almost older than the site itself and as you can imagine, I don't actually care about it. So thanks for your rant I honestly loved reading it.

You need to count the steps to get to the final output, not the actual output

This kata is old. When it was created, the general style for solutions was to try and make it as a one line solution, almost always disregarding performance just to make it look nice. With more optimized node environment and codewars becoming faster over the years, one can beat the perf tests by iterating multiple times and not care about perf. Im quite amused as to why you get so hung up about that piece of text.

I'm not listing all the specs in the description, that's what the tests are for. See below.

Hi!

The tests that run when you click Attempt have some intense performance requirements. If it timesout, then it doesn't matter how quickly your code ran for the example test cases.

Description updated

It seems quite obvious to me that a letter implies a distinct word, it can even be seen in the example test cases. I have added it to the description for those that skim read.

I'm not sure I fully understand your issue. Do you think that a=dog and b=dog make sense? If that was the case, then the entire kata would be pointless because then you can say that every single char in the pattern can be equal to anything in the word.

What do you mean by abusive? The description has ('aaaa', 'dog dog dog dog') == true

This type of edge case is not a concern for this basic kata.

The test suite is meant to test for efficiency. 6200 users have passed this kata in Python, the suite is fine and is fair.

done

I really like this kata but I'm a bit frustrated with the strict tests on the tokens and not the end result. My code optimizes the instructions so e.g. an L4 will not even generate a token as turning left 4 times gets you to the same spot, however the tests expect ['L','L','L','L']

EDIT: After thinking about it, it makes sense to have all instructions. What if you want to make your robot do a little dance where it twirls around?

Added small tests too.