LeetCode Card 317 — 1D Dynamic Programming / Assess
Pattern signal
This pattern usually appears when the prompt involves best value or count depends on a previous line of states. Climbing Stairs, House Robber, Decode Ways, and coin-change style questions often land here.
What Assess means here
In BASIC, the Assess step is where you compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits. For 1D Dynamic Programming, that matters because the pattern only becomes useful once the candidate is explicit about what is being tracked, reduced, or preserved.
Interview move
A strong move is to compare plausible approaches before committing. In this pattern family, say out loud what representation makes the problem easier: the map entry, the pointer invariant, the recursion contract, the queue contents, or the DP state. That keeps the implementation attached to a reason.
Common miss
The miss is starting recurrence discussion before the state meaning is nailed down. BASIC reduces that risk because the stage sequence forces you to earn the implementation instead of jumping straight into it.
BASIC prompt
“Given that this looks like 1D Dynamic Programming, what is the simplest way to compare the viable data structures or traversals and decide what complexity target fits?”