12/7 I should add that after having been a few hours into the problem, waking up at 4am, endlessly pacing up and down, realizing that this was gonna be a hard but fun one, it occurred to me that I should probably ask ChatGPT to do it for me – not because I wanted it to, but out of honesty and facing reality. I had already asked it to explain the algorithm to me, and it had done the best job of it that I could find anywhere, including Google and Wikipedia. And when I asked it to build the solution it responded without missing a beat, cranking out the code. It didn’t come close to being correct though. A pretty naive approach to begin with. And when I told it what was wrong, it eagerly acknowledged my correction and cranked out another solution that was only worse.