Programming Team Lecture Dynamic Programming.docVIP

Programming Team Lecture: Dynamic Programming Standard Algorithms to Know Computing Binomial Coefficients (Brassard 8.1) World Series Problem (Brassard 8.1) Making Change (Brassard 8.2) Knapsack (Brassard 8.4 Goodrich 5.3) Subset Sum (special instance of knapsack where weights=values) Floyd-Warshalls (Brassard 8.5 Cormen 26.2) Chained Matrix Multiplication (Brassard 8.6, Cormen 16.1 Goodrich 5.3) Longest Common Subsequence (Cormen 16.3) Edit Distance (Skiena 11.2) Polygon Triangulation (Cormen 16.4) Example #1: Binomial Coefficients There is a direct formula for calculating binomial coefficients, its . However, its instructive to calculate binomial coefficients using dynamic programming since the technique can be used to calculate answers to counting questions that dont have a simple closed-form formula. The recursive formula for binomial coefficients is , with . In code, this would look roughly like this: int combo(int n, int k) { if (n == 0 || n == k) return 1; else return combo(n-1,k-1)+combo(n-1,k); } However, this ends up repeating many instances of recursive calls, and ends up being very slow. We can implement a dynamic programming solution by creating a two dimensional array which stores all the values in Pascals triangle. When we need to make a recursive call, instead, we can simply look up the answer in the array. To turn a recursive solution into a DP one, heres what has to be done: a) Characterize all possible input values to the function and create an array to store the answer to each possible problem instance that is necessary to solve the problem at hand. b) Seed the array with the initial values based on the base cases in the recursive solution. c) Fill in the array (in an order so that you are always looking up array slots that are already filled) using the recursive formula, but instead of making a recursive call, look up that value in the array where it should be stored. In pseudocode, heres how binomial combinatio