A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript, Volume 1

Dynamic Programming Through Going Bottom-Up

I mentioned earlier that dynamic programming can be achieved through one of two techniques. We looked at one technique, memoization, which is quite nifty.

The second technique, known as going bottom-up, is a lot less fancy and may not even seem like a technique at all. All going bottom-up means is to ditch recursion and use some other approach (like a loop) to solve the same problem.

The reason that going bottom-up is considered part of dynamic programming is because dynamic programming means taking a problem that could be solved recursively and ensuring that it doesn’t make duplicate calls for overlapping subproblems. Using iteration (that is, loops) instead of recursion is, technically, a way to ...