History of Algorithms

Origin of the word

The word algorithm comes from the name of the 9th century Persian Muslim mathematician Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi. The word algorism originally referred only to the rules of performing arithmetic using HinduArabic numerals but evolved via European Latin translation of Al-Khwarizmi's name into algorithm by the 18th century. The use of the word evolved to include all definite procedures for solving problems or performing tasks. History: Development of the notion of "algorithm" Discrete and distinguishable symbols
Tally-marks: To keep track of their flocks, their sacks of grain and their money the ancients used tallying: accumulating stones or marks scratched on sticks, or making discrete symbols in clay. Through the Babylonian and Egyptian use of marks and symbols, eventually Roman numerals and the abacus evolved (Dilson, p. 1641). Tally marks appear prominently in unary numeral system arithmetic used in Turing machine and PostTuring machine computations.

Manipulation of symbols as "place holders" for numbers: algebra

The work of the ancient Greek geometers (Euclidean algorithm), Persian mathematician AlKhwarizmi (from whose name the terms "algorism" and "algorithm" are derived), and Western European mathematicians culminated in Leibniz's notion of the calculus ratiocinator (ca 1680):
A good century and a half ahead of his time, Leibniz proposed an algebra of logic, an algebra that would specify the rules for manipulating logical concepts in the manner that ordinary algebra specifies the rules for manipulating numbers.[19]

Mechanical contrivances with discrete states

The clock: Bolter credits the invention of the weight-driven clock as "The key invention [of Europe in the Middle Ages]", in particular the verge escapement[20] that provides us with the tick and tock of a mechanical clock. "The accurate automatic machine"[21] led immediately to "mechanical automata" beginning in the thirteenth century and finally to "computational machines" the difference engine and analytical engines of Charles Babbage and Countess Ada Lovelace.[22] Logical machines 1870 Stanley Jevons' "logical abacus" and "logical machine": The technical problem was to reduce Boolean equations when presented in a form similar to what are now known as Karnaugh maps. Jevons (1880) describes first a simple "abacus" of "slips of wood furnished with pins, contrived so that any part or class of the [logical] combinations can be picked out mechanically . . . More recently however I have reduced the system to a

completely mechanical form, and have thus embodied the whole of the indirect process of inference in what may be called a Logical Machine" His machine came equipped with "certain moveable wooden rods" and "at the foot are 21 keys like those of a piano [etc] . . .". With this machine he could analyze a "syllogism or any other simple logical argument".[23] This machine he displayed in 1870 before the Fellows of the Royal Society.[24] Another logician John Venn, however, in his 1881 Symbolic Logic, turned a jaundiced eye to this effort: "I have no high estimate myself of the interest or importance of what are sometimes called logical machines ... it does not seem to me that any contrivances at present known or likely to be discovered really deserve the name of logical machines"; see more at Algorithm characterizations. But not to be outdone he too presented "a plan somewhat analogous, I apprehend, to Prof. Jevon's abacus ... [And] [a]gain, corresponding to Prof. Jevons's logical machine, the following contrivance may be described. I prefer to call it merely a logicaldiagram machine ... but I suppose that it could do very completely all that can be rationally expected of any logical machine".[25] Jacquard loom, Hollerith punch cards, telegraphy and telephonythe electromechanical relay: Bell and Newell (1971) indicate that the Jacquard loom (1801), precursor to Hollerith cards (punch cards, 1887), and "telephone switching technologies" were the roots of a tree leading to the development of the first computers.[26] By the mid1800s the telegraph, the precursor of the telephone, was in use throughout the world, its discrete and distinguishable encoding of letters as "dots and dashes" a common sound. By the late 1800s the ticker tape (ca 1870s) was in use, as was the use of Hollerith cards in the 1890 U.S. census. Then came the Teletype (ca. 1910) with its punched-paper use of Baudot code on tape. Telephone-switching networks of electromechanical relays (invented 1835) was behind the work of George Stibitz (1937), the inventor of the digital adding device. As he worked in Bell Laboratories, he observed the "burdensome' use of mechanical calculators with gears. "He went home one evening in 1937 intending to test his idea... When the tinkering was over, Stibitz had constructed a binary adding device".[27] Davis (2000) observes the particular importance of the electromechanical relay (with its two "binary states" open and closed):
It was only with the development, beginning in the 1930s, of electromechanical calculators using electrical relays, that machines were built having the scope Babbage had envisioned."[28]

Mathematics during the 1800s up to the mid-1900s

Symbols and rules: In rapid succession the mathematics of George Boole (1847, 1854), Gottlob Frege (1879), and Giuseppe Peano (18881889) reduced arithmetic to a sequence of symbols manipulated by rules. Peano's The principles of arithmetic, presented by a new method (1888) was "the first attempt at an axiomatization of mathematics in a symbolic language".[29] But Heijenoort gives Frege (1879) this kudos: Frege's is "perhaps the most important single work ever written in logic. ... in which we see a " 'formula language', that is a lingua characterica, a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from

rhetorical embellishments ... constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules".[30] The work of Frege was further simplified and amplified by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell in their Principia Mathematica (19101913). The paradoxes: At the same time a number of disturbing paradoxes appeared in the literature, in particular the Burali-Forti paradox (1897), the Russell paradox (190203), and the Richard Paradox.[31] The resultant considerations led to Kurt Gdel's paper (1931) he specifically cites the paradox of the liarthat completely reduces rules of recursion to numbers. Effective calculability: In an effort to solve the Entscheidungsproblem defined precisely by Hilbert in 1928, mathematicians first set about to define what was meant by an "effective method" or "effective calculation" or "effective calculability" (i.e., a calculation that would succeed). In rapid succession the following appeared: Alonzo Church, Stephen Kleene and J.B. Rosser's -calculus[32] a finely honed definition of "general recursion" from the work of Gdel acting on suggestions of Jacques Herbrand (cf. Gdel's Princeton lectures of 1934) and subsequent simplifications by Kleene.[33] Church's proof[34] that the Entscheidungsproblem was unsolvable, Emil Post's definition of effective calculability as a worker mindlessly following a list of instructions to move left or right through a sequence of rooms and while there either mark or erase a paper or observe the paper and make a yes-no decision about the next instruction.[35] Alan Turing's proof of that the Entscheidungsproblem was unsolvable by use of his "a- [automatic-] machine"[36] in effect almost identical to Post's "formulation", J. Barkley Rosser's definition of "effective method" in terms of "a machine".[37] S. C. Kleene's proposal of a precursor to "Church thesis" that he called "Thesis I",[38] and a few years later Kleene's renaming his Thesis "Church's Thesis"[39] and proposing "Turing's Thesis".[40]

[edit] Emil Post (1936) and Alan Turing (19367, 1939)

Here is a remarkable coincidence of two men not knowing each other but describing a process of men-as-computers working on computationsand they yield virtually identical definitions. Emil Post (1936) described the actions of a "computer" (human being) as follows:
"...two concepts are involved: that of a symbol space in which the work leading from problem to answer is to be carried out, and a fixed unalterable set of directions.

His symbol space would be

"a two way infinite sequence of spaces or boxes... The problem solver or worker is to move and work in this symbol space, being capable of being in, and operating in but one box at a time.... a box is to admit of but two possible conditions, i.e., being empty or unmarked, and having a single mark in it, say a vertical stroke. "One box is to be singled out and called the starting point. ...a specific problem is to be given in symbolic form by a finite number of boxes [i.e., INPUT] being marked with a stroke. Likewise the answer [i.e., OUTPUT] is to be given in symbolic form by such a configuration of marked boxes....

"A set of directions applicable to a general problem sets up a deterministic process when applied to each specific problem. This process will terminate only when it comes to the direction of type (C ) [i.e., STOP]".[41] See more at PostTuring machine

Alan Turing's work[42] preceded that of Stibitz (1937); it is unknown whether Stibitz knew of the work of Turing. Turing's biographer believed that Turing's use of a typewriter-like model derived from a youthful interest: "Alan had dreamt of inventing typewriters as a boy; Mrs. Turing had a typewriter; and he could well have begun by asking himself what was meant by calling a typewriter 'mechanical'".[43] Given the prevalence of Morse code and telegraphy, ticker tape machines, and Teletypes we might conjecture that all were influences. Turinghis model of computation is now called a Turing machine begins, as did Post, with an analysis of a human computer that he whittles down to a simple set of basic motions and "states of mind". But he continues a step further and creates a machine as a model of computation of numbers.[44]
"Computing is normally done by writing certain symbols on paper. We may suppose this paper is divided into squares like a child's arithmetic book....I assume then that the computation is carried out on one-dimensional paper, i.e., on a tape divided into squares. I shall also suppose that the number of symbols which may be printed is finite.... "The behavior of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his "state of mind" at that moment. We may suppose that there is a bound B to the number of symbols or squares which the computer can observe at one moment. If he wishes to observe more, he must use successive observations. We will also suppose that the number of states of mind which need be taken into account is finite... "Let us imagine that the operations performed by the computer to be split up into 'simple operations' which are so elementary that it is not easy to imagine them further divided".[45]

Turing's reduction yields the following:

"The simple operations must therefore include: "(a) Changes of the symbol on one of the observed squares "(b) Changes of one of the squares observed to another square within L squares of one of the previously observed squares.

"It may be that some of these change necessarily invoke a change of state of mind. The most general single operation must therefore be taken to be one of the following:
"(A) A possible change (a) of symbol together with a possible change of state of mind. "(B) A possible change (b) of observed squares, together with a possible change of state of mind" "We may now construct a machine to do the work of this computer"[45].

A few years later, Turing expanded his analysis (thesis, definition) with this forceful expression of it:
"A function is said to be "effectively calculable" if its values can be found by some purely mechanical process. Although it is fairly easy to get an intuitive grasp of this idea, it is nevertheless desirable to have some more definite, mathematical expressible definition . . . [he discusses the history of the definition pretty much as presented above with respect to Gdel, Herbrand, Kleene, Church, Turing and Post] . . . We may take this statement literally, understanding by a purely mechanical process one which could be carried out by a machine. It is possible to give a mathematical description, in a certain normal form, of the structures of these machines. The development of these ideas leads to the author's definition of a computable function, and to an identification of computability with effective calculability . . . . " We shall use the expression "computable function" to mean a function calculable by a machine, and we let "effectively calculable" refer to the intuitive idea without particular identification with any one of these definitions".[46]

J. B. Rosser (1939) and S. C. Kleene (1943)

J. Barkley Rosser boldly defined an 'effective [mathematical] method' in the following manner (boldface added):
"'Effective method' is used here in the rather special sense of a method each step of which is precisely determined and which is certain to produce the answer in a finite number of steps. With this special meaning, three different precise definitions have been given to date. [his footnote #5; see discussion immediately below]. The simplest of these to state (due to Post and Turing) says essentially that an effective method of solving certain sets of problems exists if one can build a machine which will then solve any problem of the set with no human intervention beyond inserting the question and (later) reading the answer. All three definitions are equivalent, so it doesn't matter which one is used. Moreover, the fact that all three are equivalent is a very strong argument for the correctness of any one." (Rosser 1939:2256)

Rosser's footnote #5 references the work of (1) Church and Kleene and their definition of definability, in particular Church's use of it in his An Unsolvable Problem of Elementary Number Theory (1936); (2) Herbrand and Gdel and their use of recursion in particular Gdel's use in his famous paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I (1931); and (3) Post (1936) and Turing (19367) in their mechanism-models of computation. Stephen C. Kleene defined as his now-famous "Thesis I" known as the ChurchTuring thesis. But he did this in the following context (boldface in original):
"12. Algorithmic theories... In setting up a complete algorithmic theory, what we do is to describe a procedure, performable for each set of values of the independent variables, which procedure necessarily terminates and in such manner that from the outcome we can

read a definite answer, "yes" or "no," to the question, "is the predicate value true?"" (Kleene 1943:273)

[edit] History after 1950

A number of efforts have been directed toward further refinement of the definition of "algorithm", and activity is on-going because of issues surrounding, in particular, foundations of mathematics (especially the ChurchTuring Thesis) and philosophy of mind (especially arguments around artificial intelligence). For more, see Algorithm characterizations.