Used the duck too much and it.. jailbroke?

Preface: Fuck TIDEMAN. I loved the problem, hated solving it ughhhh.

I hated Week 3. I struggled with RunOff but did it in a couple of hours. Tideman? 12 hours... BUT I used the duck so much.

I actually just couldn't figure out the logic behind the functions and how I would write these complex algorithms and would cave and ask the duck to help me with a few hints or something. It would sleep over and over and I would wait for it to be up again at full lives so I could exploit it again. I didn't require it for anything other than debugging until sort pairs, but sorting, locking and printing the winner was just so much harder? I don't even know why.

Eventually, I got to lock pairs and it just blatantly gave me the answer by saying I "need to make a new function" and then I "need to implement this pseudocode" :

And blam, the answer was on my face. I chose not to look at it but after another hour of not moving forward, I checked the "pseudocode" which was basically the answer as I only had to write a for loop to basically complete it.

It seemed quite simple once I had done it. The logic might've come to me had I thought it out but I just caved.

Then, I got to print winner and thought it'd be easy, but wasted another 2 hours, and feeling exhausted as fuck, just asked the duck wtf am I supposed to do to which it just gave me the hint to make a bool for is_winner and how to toggle it and when.

I did that.

It worked. Green all around but no happiness in my heart. I feel pathetic. It feels like I've cheated :(

I regret this a lot especially because I thought I'd have been able to figure out that logic if I just allowed myself to sleep instead of deciding not to sleep before I completed it. I had been going at a relatively fast rate till week 3 so when I decided to take another week for RunOff and Tideman to take the stress off, I didn't know I would be bombarded with college assignments too.

Now, I do understand, I think, all of what I did in Tideman but I'm sure I still didn't understand all of it, especially not as much as people who did it without this kind of help.