What is "dynamic" about dynamic programming?

Problem Detail: 

One of my seniors had a job interview and he was asked why it is called dynamic. He couldn't answer and after he gave up the interviewer said that there's nothing dynamic about it, its just called like that. That is hard for me to believe.

Does it refer to the fact that the subproblems are solved during run-time and used in reaching the final goal? Like dynamic memory allocation that happens during run-time?

[ANSWER]

I should have read this wiki article before asking the question, sorry.

Asked By : akhileshh

Answered By : Realz Slaw

I always intuited that it meant that algorithms using dynamic programming seemed to edit the problem space "dynamically" until the problem could be solved with a greedy algorithm.

For example, with the Checkerboard problem, the dynamic programming algorithm edits the entire board as it goes through it, and then finally, a greedy algorithm can be used (similarly, with Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm, etc.).

I am unsure if this generalizes to every dynamic programming problem though.

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Question Source : http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/17871