Question about the rules and the example
I don't understand why the second example result == 26. Can you show the path?
In particular: when you say "must go over every mountaintop" -- does that mean that the path has to touch the highest point on every mountain? In that case I would think that the shortest path for the example would be 20:
'000000001110' '011100002310' '012100002220' '011100000000'
'XXX00XXXX110' '01X10X00XXXX' '01XXXX002XXX' '01110000000X'