Basics II: Algorithms
Hans Jürgen Prömel, Angelika Steger · Advanced lectures in mathematics · 2002
What is an algorithm? Clearly, everybody has seen many kinds of them already: recipes, directions, computer programs are all different variants of algorithms. Just as this abundance of examples facilitates the task of explaining the ideas and aims of the abstract notion of an “algorithm” it makes a formal definition difficult. In this chapter we introduce the concept of a random access machine and use it to define what we will henceforth mean when we speak of an algorithm. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.