ABSTRACT
My investigation of the question “what is dynamic programming?” has now reached its half-way mark. It is appropriate therefore to interrupt it at this point in order to reflect on what I have done so far and to set the stage for the forthcoming discussions. In particular, I wish to explain in greater detail my decision to confine the discussion to the deterministic case, and to justify the reasoning behind my decision to forgo a detailed description and analysis of specialized solution schemes for the functional equation of dynamic programming, and of dynamic programming applications.
