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Not Even a Congressman Could Object: Dynamic Programming
An e-reader's paragraphs look like ransom notes, because the layout code fills each line greedily and never looks back. The fix, published by Donald Knuth and Michael Plass in 1981, is dynamic programming. Part five of The Deep End's algorithms series explains the technique Richard Bellman named, by his own account, to slip it past a Secretary of Defense who hated the word research. We work through coins, knapsacks and edit distance by ear, see how the same table aligns DNA and powers diff, and follow the Viterbi algorithm from deep-space probes to mobile phones and speech recognition. Nadia…
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