← 💻 Technology · usually met in Std 6-12
A finite list of unambiguous steps that solves a problem. A recipe is one; so is long division.
An algorithm must be precise enough that following it requires no judgement, and must finish. Searching a sorted list by repeatedly halving it — binary search — finds an item among a million in about twenty steps, where checking one by one would take half a million on average. That difference between approaches, rather than the speed of the machine, is usually what decides whether a program is usable.
The word comes from al-Khwarizmi, the ninth-century mathematician whose work on Indian numerals reached Europe in translation. Algorithms long predate computers: the methods for multiplication you learned in primary school are algorithms, and so are the construction procedures in the Shulba Sutras.
Want to see it moving? Search YouTube for “Algorithms” ↗ — we send you to the search rather than to one video, because a link to one video eventually rots.
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