A graphical realization of the dynamic programming method for solving NP-hard combinatorial problems

AbstractIn this paper, we consider a graphical realization of dynamic programming. The concept is discussed on the partition and knapsack problems. In contrast to dynamic programming, the new algorithm can also treat problems with non-integer data without necessary transformations of the corresponding problem. We compare the proposed method with existing algorithms for these problems on small-size instances of the partition problem with n≤10 numbers. For almost all instances, the new algorithm considers on average substantially less “stages” than the dynamic programming algorithm