dsa10 min read
Burst Balloons — Interval DP with Reverse Thinking (The Hardest Grid DP Pattern)
LC 312 Burst Balloons is the classic hard-level interval DP problem asked at Google, Amazon, and Meta. The key insight is thinking in reverse — instead of choosing which balloon to burst first, choose which one to burst last in each interval. This transforms an impossible ordering problem into clean O(n^3) DP.
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