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Re:Challenge HN: Inspired by greplin's third problem by madars on Sunday October 10, 2010 @01:24PM (#1777452)
http://codepad.org/5TyD9Jqy -- C++ solution with running time of ~0.004s. 30 lines not counting empty lines/comments/braces, half of the code is generating P.
Re:Challenge HN: Inspired by greplin's third problem by letronje on Monday October 11, 2010 @03:03PM (#1780802)
how does it work ?
Re:Challenge HN: Inspired by greplin's third problem by madars on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @10:26AM (#1787181)
The solution is by dynamic programming.

Let p_1 = 2, p_2 = 3, ..., p_172 = 1021 be the first 172 primes. We will denote the number of subsets of {p_1, p_2, ..., p_k} that sum to n by D(k, n).

We know that D(0, 0) = 1 and D(0, n) = 0 if n > 0.

Also note that D(k, n) = D(k-1, n) + D(k-1, n-p_k). This comes from the fact that each subset S of {p_1, ..., p_k} can either contain p_k or not. If p_k is in S then S\{p_k} sums to n-p_k and there are D(k-1, n-p_k) such S\{p_k}. If p_k is not in S then S is made entirely of elements from {p_1, ..., p_{k-1}}, obviously there are D(k-1, n) such S.

We can use the base case and this recurrence to fill our dynamic programming table D(k, n). The answer to the original problem is D(0, p_1) + D(1, p_2) + ... + D(171, p_172).

My program implements this approach except that it fills D(k, n) by rows and doesn't keep the whole table in memory.