Counting configurations - Colegiul National C. Negruzzi (Iași)

A disc is divided into n sectors, each of which is to be painted with one of k possible colours, with the condition that two adjacent sectors have different colors. In a first part, two configurations which are obtained from each other by a rotation are considered as different, and the problem is solved firstly by a Python program for values of n, k up to n=12 and k=5. Then a general formula is obtained by means of a recurrence.
In a second part, the number of distinct configurations when we identify those that are obtained from each other by rotations is calculated for an example, but the general case remains open.