Summary
In the article Exploring Dynamic Programming, Ross Rhodes goes over three examples of dynamic programming in increasing difficulty: nth Fibonacci Number, Traversing a Matrix, and Matrix Chain Multiplication. These are problems that have straightforward but very inefficient approaches that can be solved via dynamic programming techniques such as memoization, which is an optimization technique that stores the results of expensive function calls and returns the cached result when the same inputs occur again. For example, in the case of calculating the nth Fibonacci Number for multiple different values for “n”, rather than performing those calculations again you can instead store already calculated values.
Although the three examples provided are each examples of dynamic programming, they each have moderately different approaches to solving their respective problems. As Rhodes says at the end of the blog post, these examples only scrape the surface of what dynamic programming can be used for.
Reaction to Content
I chose this topic for this week’s blog post because it was something I hadn’t been exposed to significantly. While I’ve known of the technique and its applications, I hadn’t used it for anything other than a similar application of the Fibonacci example provided. The other two examples provided are notably more complicated and helped to provide provide more insight into what situations dynamic programming can be used to solve.
Overall, while I think this article was useful for understanding dynamic programming, I think the best way to understand it is to solve problems using these techniques and to come up with your own solutions for them. That way you can really internalize these concepts and you can spot when you’ve run into a problem in which dynamic programming could be used. Just reading through these examples alone and trying to follow through the thought process won’t necessarily be enough when you have to solve a unique problem on your own.
I think this topic is definitely something that should be understood, as even if you somehow never ran into a real-world situation that dynamic programming would be useful for, understanding it will only make you a better programmer. And if nothing else, it’s likely to come up at some point in an interview.
Source: https://blog.scottlogic.com/2018/01/30/exploring-dynamic-programming.html
Andy Pham 