Backtracking vs DP: overlapping subproblems vs not A candidate sees an exponential recursion, reaches for @lru_cache, and submits. On Word Break the runtime collapses from a 30-second timeout to 8 ...

Knuth opens his backtracking fascicle with one sentence that does the whole family's work: "It exhaustively examines all possible candidates at each stage, but it usually doesn't have to look at very ...