If you need to make a decision about potential partner number N then you must accept their score (which we'll call X N) and live happily ever after! The dynamic programming approach to the potential partner problem starts by thinking about what happens when faced with the last partner. In darts, each player must score exactly 301, starting and finishing on a double. In his paper, published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society, he acknowledges 'The Wheatsheaf at Writtle and the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi for making research facilities available to me'. In the forty-odd years since this development, the number of uses and applications of dynamic programming has increased enormously.įor example, in 1982 David Kohler used dynamic programming to analyse the best way to play the game of darts. They do not have to be written in a computer language.ĭynamic programming was the brainchild of an American Mathematician, Richard Bellman, who described the way of solving problems where you need to find the best decisions one after another. Mathematicians use the word to describe a set of rules which anyone can follow to solve a problem.

The word Programming in the name has nothing to do with writing computer programs. This way of tackling the problem backwards is Dynamic programming. So you think about the best decision with the last potential partner (which you must choose) and then the last but one and so on. Instead, a mathematical way of thinking about it is to look at what you should do at the end, if you get to that stage. Unfortunately, working out what you might expect later on is a complicated mixture of all the possible decisions you could make that becomes too much to work out. Then you would compare this partner's score with what you might expect to get later on if you rejected them. The obvious way to look at this would be to think about what you would do when you met the first potential partner. We must now search for a rule which will make sure that the average score of the partner we choose is as large as possible. Suppose we use this scale to measure each potential partner's score from 0 millihelens up to a maximum of 1000 millihelens with all values equally likely. Helen: her affair with Paris, Prince of Troy, started the Trojan wars.

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