Pergunta de entrevista da empresa Synopsys

The most unexpected question was related to problem solving ability and it involved finding the termination condition for a problem where it initially seemed that we would require exhaustive enumeration of all the solutions. The problem was related to processing of items in a set such that each item had a value associated with it. After the processing, the value of the items could only improve.How would you find the maximum of the values after processing.