The power of pruning in backtracking V
Backtracking is a great technique in algorithms, but it needs to be accompanied by aggressive pruning or else it may quickly become intractable. This was an interesting problem, and the small input numbers (10^5 and k<=5) tells me that the authors knew that this could quickly become intractable, even with pruning. The pruning here primarily happens in two occasions: first during the base case (k==0), second when the product becomes larger than n. Comparing my solution with Sonnet 4's and ChatGPT 5's (and I gave them all the hints too), there is a small gain in my solution compared to theirs. It was surprising to see that Anthropic's one didn't make use of pruning as well as mine's or ChatGPT 5's. Code is down below, cheers, ACC. Balanced K-Factor Decomposition - LeetCode Given two integers n and k , split the number n into exactly k positive integers such that the product of these integers is equal to n . Return any ...