Burst Balloons - Solution & Explanation

This approach involves using a recursive function to try bursting each balloon and calculating the coins collected, while storing results of already computed subproblems to avoid redundant calculations. We pad the nums array with 1 at both ends to handle boundary conditions easily. For each subproblem defined by indices left and right, we choose a balloon i to burst last and calculate the coins.

This Python solution uses a memoized recursive approach. We define the function dp(left, right) to compute the maximum coins that can be obtained from balloons between left and right. The base case is when there are no balloons to burst between left and right. For each possible balloon i to burst, we maximize our coins by considering bursting i last in that subarray and adding the result from recursive calls to the left and right subproblems.

In this approach, we use a DP table to systematically build up solutions from smaller problems to a larger one without recursion. We create a dynamic programming matrix dp where dp[left][right] indicates the max coins to be obtained from subarray nums[left:right]. For each subarray defined by len, we consider bursting each possible k as the last balloon and compute the result using previously computed results.

The Python solution uses a bottom-up dynamic programming table to iterate through all subarray lengths from 3 upwards since we initially padded the nums array. This way, we are able to systematically determine the most coins by considering each k element in this sub-array as the last balloon to burst and combining results from smaller subproblems.