Summary
Today we learned about recursion and discussed its advantages and disadvantages. We explored memoization as a way to make recursive code remember past results, thus speeding it up dramatically in some situations.
Remember, recursion is your friend. Faced with a journey of a great distance, the iterative thinker says “This is going to take a lot of steps,” but the recursive thinker says “I will take one step, then start a brand-new journey that is slightly shorter than this one.” Guess who suffers less stress.
When you have a knotty logic problem in front of you, be on the lookout for ways to divide it into a recurrence relation (what “one step” in the solution should look like) and a base case (how you can recognize when the task is almost ...
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