I saw a mention to the Pascal’s Triangle not that long ago and thought of writing some code to solve it. It’s a lot easier than the 8 queens puzzle and can be done easily under 10 minutes. I wrote it in Chrome’s snippet. The Javascript errors are not that great though. I forgot a semi colon inside a for loop, and all I got was Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier on the next line. So it was a bit confusing. A real IDE would have shown me the error straight. Anyway, he’re what I came up with.
function compute(size) {
size = parseInt(size);
if (isNaN(size) || size < 1) {
return null;
}
if (size === 1) {
return [[1]];
} else {
var previousSolutions = compute(size -1);
var previousSolution = previousSolutions[size - 2];
var newSolution = [];
// 1st element is always 1.
newSolution.push(1);
for(var i=1; i<size - 1; i++){
newSolution.push(previousSolution[i - 1] + previousSolution[i])
}
// Last element is always 1.
newSolution.push(1);
previousSolutions.push(newSolution);
return previousSolutions;
}
}
console.table(compute(10));