Understanding Dynamic Programming
After greedy and divide and conquer, we will turn our attention to dynamic programming. Dynamic programming is an algorithm design paradigm that also attempts to solve optimization problems by combining solutions with subproblems. Unlike divide and conquer, subproblems need to exhibit optimal substructure for dynamic programming to be applicable.
Elements of a Dynamic Programming Problem
There are two key ingredients that an optimization problem must have for dynamic programming to be applicable: optimal substructure and overlapping subproblems.
Optimal Substructure
Optimal substructure is something we already covered when we introduced greedy algorithms. Recall that a problem exhibits optimal substructure, if an optimal solution to the problem contains within it, the optimal solutions to the sub-problems. There's a common pattern when trying to discover optimal substructure for a problem that can be explained as follows:
- Show that a solution to the problem consists...
