Rod Cutting Problem in DSA C - Build from Scratch

Rod Cutting Problem

📖 Scenario: You have a rod of a certain length and a price list for different lengths of rods. You want to cut the rod into pieces to get the maximum total price.Imagine you have a wooden stick and a price chart for selling pieces of different sizes. Your goal is to decide how to cut the stick to earn the most money.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that calculates the maximum price you can get by cutting a rod into pieces using a simple approach.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array called prices with prices for rod lengths 1 to 8.

Create an integer variable called rod_length with the value 8.

Use a loop to calculate the maximum price for the rod length using the prices array.

Print the maximum price.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

This problem models real-life situations where you need to cut raw materials into pieces to maximize profit, like cutting metal rods, wood, or fabric.

💼 Career

Understanding this problem helps in roles involving optimization, manufacturing, and resource management where maximizing value from limited resources is important.

1

Create the prices array

Create an integer array called prices with these exact values: 1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 17, 20.

DSA C

# Create the prices array
// Your code here

Hint

Use int prices[] = { ... }; to create the array with the given values.

2

Set the rod length

Create an integer variable called rod_length and set it to 8.

DSA C

int prices[] = {1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 17, 20};
// Set the rod length
// Your code here

Hint

Use int rod_length = 8; to set the rod length.

3

Calculate the maximum price

Create an integer variable called max_price and set it to 0. Then use a for loop with variable i from 1 to rod_length inclusive. Inside the loop, update max_price to the maximum of its current value and prices[i - 1] + prices[rod_length - i].

DSA C

int prices[] = {1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 17, 20};
int rod_length = 8;
// Calculate the maximum price
// Your code here

Hint

Use a loop from 1 to rod_length and update max_price if the sum of prices for two pieces is greater.

4

Print the maximum price

Use printf to print the text "Maximum price: " followed by the value of max_price and a newline.

DSA C

int prices[] = {1, 5, 8, 9, 10, 17, 17, 20};
int rod_length = 8;
int max_price = 0;
for (int i = 1; i  max_price) {
        max_price = current_price;
    }
}
// Print the maximum price
// Your code here

Hint

Use printf("Maximum price: %d\n", max_price); to print the result.