al solutgoions

Algorithms are essential to the way computers process information, because a computer program is essentially an algorithm that tells the computer what specific steps to perform (in what specific order) in order to carry out a specified task, such as calculating employees’ paychecks or printing students’ report cards. Thus, an algorithm can be considered to be any sequence of operations that can be performed by a Turing-complete system. Authors who assert this thesis include Savage (1987) and Gurevich (2000):

"...Turing's informal argument in favor of his thesis justifies a stronger thesis: every algorithm can be simulated by a Turing machine" (Gurevich 2000:1) ...according to Savage [1987], "an algorithm is a computational process defined by a Turing machine."(Gurevich 2000:3)

Typically, when an algorithm is associated with processing information, data are read from an input source or device, written to an output sink or device, and/or stored for further processing. Stored data are regarded as part of the internal state of the entity performing the algorithm. In practice, the state is stored in a data structure, but an algorithm requires the internal data only for specific operation sets called abstract data types.