Thread by @swapnakpanda

💡 Are you a programmer? How do you approach while solving a problem?

A must-read for beginners.

🧵 👇

P.S: This thread is not meant to teach you about any specific approach. Rather I would give more emphasis on "understanding what is asked" and "how to program it efficiently".

✪ Problem 1️⃣

Let's take "Printing the Asterisks" problem. It's simple, yet tricky sometimes.

Print below on screen

✪
✪✪
✪✪✪
✪✪✪✪
✪✪✪✪✪

When I see it, I have 👇 understandings

There are total 5 lines to print
1st line to have 1 ✪, 2nd line to have 2 ✪. So, kth line would have k ✪

What are yours?

With ☝️ understandings, it became easy for me to program it.

✪ Pseudo Code

→ Iterate 'i' from 1 to 5
→ For each 'i', print 'i' number of ✪ and a 'new line' character

✪ Alternate Problem 1️⃣

If above problem is modified and asked to print below on screen

✪✪✪✪✪
✪✪✪✪
✪✪✪
✪✪
✪

Understandings are 👇

→ There are total 5 lines to print
→ 1st line to have 5 ✪, 2nd line to have 4 ✪. 5th line to have 1 ✪

For programming, we need to find out a formula for how many ✪ in 'i'th line.

✪ Observing the Pattern

Line/Asterisks
1/5
2/4
3/3
4/2
5/1

What do you observe? For me, the pattern is (Line + Asterisks) results always to 6.

What is 6? Any guess?

To me it's (Total number of Lines + 1). What do you say?

So, 'i'th line will have (6 - i) asterisks.

✪ Pseudo Code

→ Iterate 'i' from 1 to 5
→ For each 'i', print '6 - i' number of ✪ and a 'new line' character

Good that, we solved this problem and understood about finding a pattern.

But now, think for some time. Can this be done in a better approach? The solution lies in the picture itself.

Don't you think the 1st picture is just turned upside down to result into 2nd picture?

How can we represent "upside down" programmatically?

Can we say "Iterate from 5 to 1"? Think.

✪ Pseudo Code

→ Iterate 'i' from 5 to 1
→ For each 'i', print 'i' number of ✪ and a 'new line' character

So, what do we observe?

✪ We can solve a problem in many ways
✪ The approach we choose defines the complexity of the solution
✪ Approach is refined by our looking at picture in a different way.

Trust me. Nobody can teach another person how to approach for a solution. Even a 1 year old kid finds solutions to his problems himself. That's how we humans are.

The approach gets sharp with practice and experience.

One best way is to change the original problem to some extent. Then observe how the solution is changing as well. Try to refine your approach for finding a better solution every time.

We come to the end of this 🧵 Hope you find it useful.

👋 I am Swapna and I write contents on DSA, JavaScript and Python

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