List manipulation

The direct approach would be to manipulate and check the given lists to solve this. This solution uses a helper function, which simplifies things, but the approach can be implemented without it.

SUBLIST = 1
SUPERLIST = 2
EQUAL = 3
UNEQUAL = 4

def check_sub_sequences(list_one, list_two):
    n1 = len(list_one)
    n2 = len(list_two)
    return any(list_two[i:i+n1] == list_one for i in range(n2 - n1 + 1))
    
def sublist(list_one, list_two):
    if list_one == list_two:
        return EQUAL
    if check_sub_sequences(list_one, list_two):
        return SUBLIST
    if check_sub_sequences(list_two, list_one):
        return SUPERLIST
    return UNEQUAL

We first check for equality using the == operator, if so, then we return EQUAL. A common way to do this differently would be to return 1 directly, but this is better practice as we remove magic values.

After that we call check_sub_sequences passing in list_one and list_two. In the helper function, we check if any of the possible sub-sequences in list_two of length n1 (the length of the first list) are equal to the first list. If so, then we conclude that list_one is a SUBLIST of list_two.

To find whether list_one is a SUPERLIST of list_two, we just reverse this process - pass in the lists in the opposite order. Thus, we check if any of the possible sub-sequences in list_one of length n2 (the length of the second list) are equal to the second list.

If none of the above conditions are true, we conclude that the two lists are unequal.