Euler project #18 approach

Question

I am looking into an Euler project. Specifically #18.
To sum up, the idea is to find the max path from a triangle:

   3
  7 4
 2 4 6  
8 5 9 3
<         


        

Answer 1

Taking a bottom up approach eliminates paths while going top-down only adds potential paths.

Because you're eliminating bad paths quicker, doing a breadth-first search becomes the optimal solution. A depth-first search in either direction is both wrong (as you've shown) and slow.