Couting the number of reduce moves

Question

The maximum number of reduce moves that can be taken by a bottom-up parser with no epsilon and unit productions to parse a string of length 3 tokens is ____ ?

Comments

what if we have

A-> A+B /a

B->a then for aaa we need 3 moves so why 2 is ans

Answer 1

if grammar is CNF then total reduce move are 2n-1. put n=3 here .

number of reduced move = 5

Comments

Its solution has been given as 2 with the following explaination. Please check if it makes some sense

Answer 2

There are n-1 moves for this.

For example take S->aBC

B->a

C->a

then The string aaa can be derived by 2 moves S->aaC

and S->aaa

Answer 3

Answer : 2

Total n-1 reduce moves taken by a bottom-up parser if there is no epsilon or unit production.

Intutive explaination  :  We can reduce except the start production. So, removing 1 production(token).