Backtracking

Summary

A refinement of recursion that builds a solution incrementally and abandons ('backtracks from') a path as soon as it's known to be invalid — used for permutations, combinations and puzzles.

How to Learn This

1Solve classic backtracking problems: subsets, permutations, N-Queens.
2Draw the decision tree for a small backtracking problem by hand first.
3Learn to add pruning (early exit) to avoid exploring clearly invalid branches.

Recursion

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More topics in Data Structures & Algorithms

Arrays Strings Linked List Stack Queue HashMap Heap Tree Graph Binary Search Recursion Sliding Window Greedy Dynamic Programming Sorting Searching

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