Author: Stan Eisenstat
Subject: Re: [Cs223] Confusion regarding BinpackI
Date: Thursday, 13 Feb 2020, 07:44:54

    > I've been testing my backtracking recently and am wondering about the
    > behavior of your BinpackI. I essentially made a static local variable to
    > count the number of times I called my backtracking method and outputted
    > this value at the end of main().
    >
    > I ran the following output for your BinpackI: % ./BinpackI 100 50 20 30 44
    > 56 89 2 22 -opt
    >
    > and the output was
    > #backtracks(-opt) = 0
    > -opt 4
    >
    > I was quite confused by the 0 that was printed. Does this mean that the
    > backtracking method was called 0 times? This doesn't seem to make sense as
    > I would expect the backtracking method to be called at least the number of
    > items needed to be placed.

Hwk2/BinpackI subtracts 1 + #items from the number of
calls to the backtrack function.  Thus 0 implies that
each item was placed exactly once.

--Stan-