Number of possible combinations

Question

How many possible combinations of the variables a,b,c,d,e are possible if I know that:

a+b+c+d+e = 500

and that they are all integers and >= 0, so I know they are finite.

Answer 1

@Torlack, @Jason Cohen: Recursion is a bad idea here, because there are "overlapping subproblems." I.e., If you choose a as 1 and b as 2, then you have 3 variables left that should add up to 497; you arrive at the same subproblem by choosing a as 2 and b as 1. (The number of such coincidences explodes as the numbers grow.)

The traditional way to attack such a problem is dynamic programming: build a table bottom-up of the solutions to the sub-problems (starting with "how many combinations of 1 variable add up to 0?") then building up through iteration (the solution to "how many combinations of n variables add up to k?" is the sum of the solutions to "how many combinations of n-1 variables add up to j?" with 0 <= j <= k).

public static long getCombos( int n, int sum ) {
  // tab[i][j] is how many combinations of (i+1) vars add up to j
  long[][] tab = new long[n][sum+1];
  // # of combos of 1 var for any sum is 1
  for( int j=0; j < tab[0].length; ++j ) {
    tab[0][j] = 1;
  }
  for( int i=1; i < tab.length; ++i ) {
    for( int j=0; j < tab[i].length; ++j ) {
      // # combos of (i+1) vars adding up to j is the sum of the #
      // of combos of i vars adding up to k, for all 0 <= k <= j
      // (choosing i vars forces the choice of the (i+1)st).
      tab[i][j] = 0;
      for( int k=0; k <= j; ++k ) {
        tab[i][j] += tab[i-1][k];
      }
    }
  }
  return tab[n-1][sum];
}

$ time java Combos
2656615626

real    0m0.151s
user    0m0.120s
sys 0m0.012s

Answer 2

The answer to your question is 2656615626.

Here's the code that generates the answer:

public static long getNumCombinations( int summands, int sum )
{
    if ( summands <= 1 )
        return 1;
    long combos = 0;
    for ( int a = 0 ; a <= sum ; a++ )
        combos += getNumCombinations( summands-1, sum-a );
    return combos;
}

In your case, summands is 5 and sum is 500.

Note that this code is slow. If you need speed, cache the results from summand,sum pairs.

I'm assuming you want numbers >=0. If you want >0, replace the loop initialization with a = 1 and the loop condition with a < sum. I'm also assuming you want permutations (e.g. 1+2+3+4+5 plus 2+1+3+4+5 etc). You could change the for-loop if you wanted a >= b >= c >= d >= e.