Solving an Excel World Cup case with Dynamic Programming

This is my live (and slightly hurried!) attempt at Lana Banana, an Excel challenge by Harry Gross from the Excel World Championship. Solving the later levels of this case requires a technique called dynamic programming by computer scientists (although you don't need to know that to use it!).

I stuffed up the last two bonus questions - B2 by counting all pairs of adjacent cells instead of adjacent bananas, and B3 because I tried to do it in a rush and put some references in the wrong place.

This is the formula I used for bonus 3:
=IF(Map!B2="🍌",1+MAX(A4:E4,D2),MAX(B3:D3,C3:E3,E2))

And this is what I should have used:
=IF(Map!B2="🍌",1+MAX(A4:E4,C3:E3,E2),MAX(B3:D3,D2))

(i.e. I added D2 to the first MAX instead of the second, and C3:E3,E2 to the second one instead of the first)

You can watch the live stream competitors workings on this challenge (with fun commentary!) here:

And if you didn't take part but want to buy the case, you can get it here (it looks like it's not uploaded yet, but probably won't be long):

(Thumbnail featuring art that Bing Create made for me with the prompt "a computer showing a monkey and a banana made of green text in the style of the matrix")

[Harryjackgross]

Consistently impressed with how checking you manage to squeeze in in the time

[Harryjackgross]

I was so surprised and pleased to see your combined version of the L5 tables was way nicer and neater than my original solution! (Which was two linked tables like your first L5 answer)

[steve_yu]

Wow, this is so difficult. Is this supposed to be Round 1? What would the Final be like, with a Round 1 that looks like this? 😅

[LorenzoFoti]

First time I can actually feel the pressure...and the relief realizing that lvl 3 and 4 are the same! 🙂
Anyway I still don't feel that confident to record my real live attempt with the tournament at stake. Do you find that talking to yourself (and for the video) helps in the performance? maybe in avoiding silly errors just because you explain the steps out loud?

[Fam_From_Town]

It seems like you have forgotten to use a mouse 😁😁

Can you make a video about how you do everything just with keyboard