Project Euler #912: Where are the Odds?

During the solving of a problem on Project Euler, I learned that compilers are smarter than me.

I don't remember the problem number or its title, but it involved starting from the top-left corner of a 2D grid and finding how many possible paths there are to get to the bottom-right corner while only moving either down or right.

My naive solution was a brute-force depth-first recursive search. On my CPU at the time, it took about 3 minutes to solve. I thought, the logic of this is incredibly simple, why not do it in assembly?

My assembly solution took 5 minutes.

I decompiled the compiled C code to see what it had done, but I couldn't understand it. My assembly knowledge was too basic.

Thinking on it now, I wonder if a modern compiler would solve the entire problem at compile-time and just hard-code the answer to be output at runtime.

Sounds like problem 15 [1]?

[1]: https://projecteuler.net/problem=15

Yup! That was it!

If you want a few similar problems, in ascending order of difficulty, try #81 through #83:

https://projecteuler.net/problem=81

https://projecteuler.net/problem=82

https://projecteuler.net/problem=83

Couldn't all three of those be solved using the A* path-finding algorithm?