What Is an Algorithm?

Yiannis N. Moschovakis

A chapter in Mathematics Unlimited — 2001 and Beyond, 2001, pp 919-936 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract When algorithms are defined rigorously in Computer Science literature (which only happens rarely), they are generally identified with abstract machines, mathematical models of computers, sometimes idealized by allowing access to “unbounded memory”.1 My aims here are to argue that this does not square with our intuitions about algorithms and the way we interpret and apply results about them; to promote the problem of defining algorithms correctly; and to describe briefly a plausible solution, by which algorithms are recursive definitions while machines model implementations, a special kind of algorithms.

Date: 2001
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-56478-9_46

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