http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=546445


in reply to puzzle: how many ways to make $100

You're looking for the Greedy Algorithm. It's basically the reverse from your approach: you start out with the highest denomination, then decrease that and spread the difference among the lower denominations.

Here's one link: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Algorithms/MyAlgorithms/Greedy/greedyIntro.htm

I dug up my solution to problem 31 on Project Euler.

#!/usr/bin/perl use List::Util qw/ sum /; @w = ( 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 ); $S = 100; $found = 0; @c = ( 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ); partition( $S, @c ); print "$/Total found: $found$/"; sub partition { my ( $s, @c ) = @_; while(1) { # exact change $found++ if $s - amount( \@c, \@w ) == 0; # last match return if $c[0] == $s; # decrement first non-zero my $i = 0; $i++ while $c[$i] == 0; $i == 0 ? $c[0] = 0 : $c[$i]--; @c[ 0 .. $i - 1 ] = (0) x $i; # and redistribute difference for my $j ( reverse 0 .. $i - 1 ) { my $Dj = $s - amount( \@c, \@w ); $c[$j] = int( $Dj / $w[$j] ); } } } sub amount { my ( $x, $y ) = @_; return sum map { $x->[$_] * $y->[$_] } 0 .. $#$x; }

It could use some refactoring, but I was in a hurry and I didn't write it for public consumption ;)

Update: Oh right, yes, output... I get Total found: 4563.