Final Remarks

Congratulations! You have successfully completed the “Go With the Flow” module.

Summary#

In this module, we learned about problems whose optimal solution requires examining all possibilities. Such problems arise in game design, mathematical puzzles, software configuration management, image editing, and cell phone interface design. To deal with such problems, we learned to use a technique known as backtracking to exhaustively search through the entire solution space and collect all the information needed to compute the optimal solution. We also gained hands-on experience with using backtracking to solve problems in the Subsets pattern, where we need to systematically construct all or some of the possible subsets of a given set.

What's Next#

Now that we have learned how to use backtracking to solve problems requiring exhaustive search, we will cover two coding patterns that allow us to solve problems more efficiently, in the next module, “Optimization Techniques.”