"Hike on a Graph" is a game that is played on a board on which an undirected graph is drawn. The graph is complete and has all loops, i.e. for any two locations there is exactly one arrow between them. The arrows are coloured. There are three players, and each of them has a piece. At the beginning of the game, the three pieces are in fixed locations on the graph. In turn, the players may do a move. A move consists of moving one's own piece along an arrow to a new location on the board. The following constraint is imposed on this: the piece may only be moved along arrows of the same colour as the arrow between the two opponents' pieces.
In the sixties ("make love not war") a one-person variant of the game emerged. In this variant one person moves all the three pieces, not necessarily one after the other, but of course only one at a time. Goal of this game is to get all pieces onto the same location, using as few moves as possible. Find out the smallest number of moves that is necessary to get all three pieces onto the same location, for a given board layout and starting positions.