How to find all combinations of coins when given some dollar value [closed]

I found a piece of code that I was writing for interview prep few months ago.

According to the comment I had, it was trying to solve this problem:

Given some dollar value in cents (e.g. 200 = 2 dollars, 1000 = 10 dollars), find all the combinations of coins that make up the dollar value. There are only pennies (1¢), nickels (5¢), dimes (10¢), and quarters (25¢) allowed.

For example, if 100 was given, the answer should be:

4 quarter(s) 0 dime(s) 0 nickel(s) 0 pennies  
3 quarter(s) 1 dime(s) 0 nickel(s) 15 pennies  
etc.

I believe that this can be solved in both iterative and recursive ways. My recursive solution is quite buggy, and I was wondering how other people would solve this problem. The difficult part of this problem was making it as efficient as possible.

I looked into this once a long time ago, and you can read my little write-up on it. Here’s the Mathematica source.

By using generating functions, you can get a closed-form constant-time solution to the problem. Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik’s Concrete Mathematics is the book for this, and contains a fairly extensive discussion of the problem. Essentially you define a polynomial where the nth coefficient is the number of ways of making change for n dollars.

Pages 4-5 of the writeup show how you can use Mathematica (or any other convenient computer algebra system) to compute the answer for 10^10^6 dollars in a couple seconds in three lines of code.

(And this was long enough ago that that’s a couple of seconds on a 75Mhz Pentium...)

Note: This only shows the number of ways.

Scala function:

def countChange(money: Int, coins: List[Int]): Int =
  if (money == 0) 1
  else if (coins.isEmpty || money < 0) 0
  else countChange(money - coins.head, coins) + countChange(money, coins.tail)

I would favor a recursive solution. You have some list of denominations, if the smallest one can evenly divide any remaining currency amount, this should work fine.

Basically, you move from largest to smallest denominations.
Recursively,

1. You have a current total to fill, and a largest denomination (with more than 1 left). If there is only 1 denomination left, there is only one way to fill the total. You can use 0 to k copies of your current denomination such that k * cur denomination <= total.
2. For 0 to k, call the function with the modified total and new largest denomination.
3. Add up the results from 0 to k. That's how many ways you can fill your total from the current denomination on down. Return this number.

Here's my python version of your stated problem, for 200 cents. I get 1463 ways. This version prints all the combinations and the final count total.

#!/usr/bin/python

# find the number of ways to reach a total with the given number of combinations

cents = 200
denominations = [25, 10, 5, 1]
names = {25: "quarter(s)", 10: "dime(s)", 5 : "nickel(s)", 1 : "pennies"}

def count_combs(left, i, comb, add):
    if add: comb.append(add)
    if left == 0 or (i+1) == len(denominations):
        if (i+1) == len(denominations) and left > 0:
           if left % denominations[i]:
               return 0
           comb.append( (left/denominations[i], demoninations[i]) )
           i += 1
        while i < len(denominations):
            comb.append( (0, denominations[i]) )
            i += 1
        print(" ".join("%d %s" % (n,names[c]) for (n,c) in comb))
        return 1
    cur = denominations[i]
    return sum(count_combs(left-x*cur, i+1, comb[:], (x,cur)) for x in range(0, int(left/cur)+1))

count_combs(cents, 0, [], None)

Scala function :

def countChange(money: Int, coins: List[Int]): Int = {

def loop(money: Int, lcoins: List[Int], count: Int): Int = {
  // if there are no more coins or if we run out of money ... return 0 
  if ( lcoins.isEmpty || money < 0) 0
  else{
    if (money == 0 ) count + 1   
/* if the recursive subtraction leads to 0 money left - a prefect division hence return count +1 */
    else
/* keep iterating ... sum over money and the rest of the coins and money - the first item and the full set of coins left*/
      loop(money, lcoins.tail,count) + loop(money - lcoins.head,lcoins, count)
  }
}

val x = loop(money, coins, 0)
Console println x
x
}

Here's some absolutely straightforward C++ code to solve the problem which did ask for all the combinations to be shown.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    if (argc != 2)
    {
        printf("usage: change amount-in-cents\n");
        return 1;
    }

    int total = atoi(argv[1]);

    printf("quarter\tdime\tnickle\tpenny\tto make %d\n", total);

    int combos = 0;

    for (int q = 0; q <= total / 25; q++)
    {
        int total_less_q = total - q * 25;
        for (int d = 0; d <= total_less_q / 10; d++)
        {
            int total_less_q_d = total_less_q - d * 10;
            for (int n = 0; n <= total_less_q_d / 5; n++)
            {
                int p = total_less_q_d - n * 5;
                printf("%d\t%d\t%d\t%d\n", q, d, n, p);
                combos++;
            }
        }
    }

    printf("%d combinations\n", combos);

    return 0;
}

But I'm quite intrigued about the sub problem of just calculating the number of combinations. I suspect there's a closed-form equation for it.