You're looking at this the wrong way. It doesn't work this way for any profession. Do you think that doctors are created by taking a sick person, sticking them in front of an untrained 'doctor-want-to-be', and seeing if they somehow miraculously manage to correctly diagnose and treat an ailment they've never heard of?

No. They train. They study symptoms, and causes, and treatments. They learn about how symptom X is caused by disease Y, and is usually treated by medicine Z.

But medicine Z doesn't work in all cases, it's only 75% effective. So you might need to try medicine Z2 instead. etc.

And they they do this, over and over and over, adding in new knowledge of symptoms, treatments, effectiveness, etc. They do this on paper, and they do this in a controlled, supervised environments until they can demonstrate enough mastery to be able to demonstrate that they know enough of this body of knowledge of problems and solutions to be trusted to apply it on their own.

Programming is no different. Answers don't magically spring, unbidden, from some secret programming organ in your brain - you need to learn the established patterns for solving different types of problems. Then, you need to apply them to different situations.

Right now, you're frustrated because you don't have a very big 'bag of tricks' yet. You've only learned a couple of 'solution patterns'. You said that some problems are easy - right? Well, they're easy because you've already added those to your 'bag of tricks'. You've learned the patterns that solve those particular problems.

The ones that are hard? That's because you haven't learned those patterns yet. Once you do, they'll be easy too.

So, looking up solutions for how to solve these 'hard' problems isn't cheating - it's learning. You're learning new solutions.

As time goes by, your library of problem->solutions will get bigger and bigger, allowing you to solve more types of problems.

So, don't think of it 'ZOMG - I'm so dumb! I can't magically come up with the solution to this type of problem that I haven't encountered before!'

Instead, think of it as 'Hmm. That's interesting. Here's a new category of problem that I haven't solved before. The existing solutions that I have in my toolkit aren't solving it, so let's go learn a new solution pattern. Then I can add it to my toolkit for future problems.'

Asking for the solution, and asking about the process they've used to solve a problem is not the same. Learn the process so you can solve similar problems in the future. I wouldn't consider it cheating or "not counting", they've had to learn how to solve those types of problems somewhere.

the problem isnt' dead because the solution and what you do with it in the future. Teaching a (wo/man) to fish. There's always going to be future problems and ways that synthesizing what you know from others IS the way we get better. Also you're being selfish. Not asking means you're not able to give another an opportunity to enjoy helping you and taking that with them as an accomplishment for the day. Get out of your head on this one. You're able to help people who can't do something right? Why deny the joy or accomplishment to somebody else?

There's no shame in reaching out to others when problem solving, that's part of (and should be part of!) the problem solving process. In my experience, Interviewers love when you ask intelligent questions.