Question

Consider the problem in which you have a value of N and you need to calculate how many ways you can sum up to N dollars using [1,2,5,10,20,50,100] Dollar bills.

Consider the classic DP solution:

C = [1,2,5,10,20,50,100]

def comb(p):
    if p==0:
        return 1
    c = 0
    for x in C:
        if x <= p:
            c += comb(p-x)
    return c 

It does not take into effect the order of the summed parts. For example, comb(4) will yield 5 results: [1,1,1,1],[2,1,1],[1,2,1],[1,1,2],[2,2] whereas there are actually 3 results ([2,1,1],[1,2,1],[1,1,2] are all the same).

What is the DP idiom for calculating this problem? (non-elegant solutions such as generating all possible solutions and removing duplicates are not welcome)

Answer 1

You should not go from begining each time, but at max from were you came from at each depth.
That mean that you have to pass two parameters, start and remaining total.

C = [1,5,10,20,50,100]

def comb(p,start=0):
    if p==0:
        return 1
    c = 0
    for i,x in enumerate(C[start:]):
        if x <= p:
            c += comb(p-x,i+start)
    return c 

or equivalent (it might be more readable)

C = [1,5,10,20,50,100]

def comb(p,start=0):
    if p==0:
        return 1
    c = 0
    for i in range(start,len(C)):
        x=C[i]
        if x <= p:
            c += comb(p-x,i)
    return c