A knapsack is a container that can only hold so much of something. You have a collection of objects with a weight and/or volume and a value. You want to maximize the value. Fractional knapsack problems concern things like flour and sugar, that you can measure out a fractional unit of. In 0/1 knapsack problems, you have a collection of objects: either you put in the TV or you don't; no half-TV's. Quoting from _Introduction to Algorithms_ (Cormen, Leiserson, & Rivest), 'Dynamic programming, like the divide-and-conquer method, solves problems by combining the solutions to subproblems. ("Programming" in this context refers to a tabular method, not to writing computer code.) ... Divide-and-conquer algorithms partition the problem into independant subproblems, solve the problems recursively, and then combine their solutions to solve the original problem. In contrast, dynamic programming is applicable when the subproblems are not independent..." -- Mike Stay Cryptographer / Programmer AccessData Corp. mailto:staym@accessdata.com