Hey everyone!

I’m trying out the Collatz conjecture exercise in python on exercism but when I run my code my session times out. I’m pretty sure I’m stuck in an infinite loop but I’m not sure why as I made sure to put in the condition for the loop to break in my while statement.

I tried putting in an if statement as well in case i made a mistake initally. But it still isn’t working. I have no idea what to do at this point.

I put my code here too in case any clarifications are needed.

def steps(number):
    if number < 0:
        raise ValueError("Only positive integers are allowed")
    steps = 0

    while number != 1:
        number = (3*number)+1 if number%2 else number/2
        steps += 1 
        if number == 1:
            break
        
    return steps