Advent of Code

  {:year 2017}

--- Day 3: Spiral Memory ---

You come across an experimental new kind of memory stored on an infinite two-dimensional grid.

Each square on the grid is allocated in a spiral pattern starting at a location marked 1 and then counting up while spiraling outward. For example, the first few squares are allocated like this:

17  16  15  14  13
18   5   4   3  12
19   6   1   2  11
20   7   8   9  10
21  22  23---> ...

While this is very space-efficient (no squares are skipped), requested data must be carried back to square 1 (the location of the only access port for this memory system) by programs that can only move up, down, left, or right. They always take the shortest path: the Manhattan Distance between the location of the data and square 1.

For example:

How many steps are required to carry the data from the square identified in your puzzle input all the way to the access port?

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