LeetCode 97 Interleaving String - Why Naive Fails

Why brute force fails

Try all ways to pick characters alternately from s1 and s2 to form s3.

At each position in s3, you choose from s1 or s2. With lengths mm and nn, there are (m+nm)\binom{m+n}{m} ways.

Checking each is exponential. Can you reuse partial solutions?