1 The Role of Algorithms in Computing

What are algorithms? Why is the study of algorithms worthwhile? What is the role
of algorithms relative to other technologies used in computers? In this chapter, we
will answer these questions.

1.1 Algorithms

Informally, an algorithm is any well-defined computational procedure that takes

some value, or set of values, as input and produces some value, or set of values, as
output. An algorithm is thus a sequence of computational steps that transform the
input into the output.
We can also view an algorithm as a tool for solving a well-specified computa-
tional problem. The statement of the problem specifies in general terms the desired
input/output relationship. The algorithm describes a specific computational proce-
dure for achieving that input/output relationship.
For example, we might need to sort a sequence of numbers into nondecreasing
order. This problem arises frequently in practice and provides fertile ground for
introducing many standard design techniques and analysis tools. Here is how we
formally define the sorting problem:
Input: A sequence of n numbers ha1 ; a2 ; : : : ; an i.
Output: A permutation (reordering) ha10 ; a20 ; : : : ; an0 i of the input sequence such
that a10 ! a20 ! " " " ! an0 .
For example, given the input sequence h31; 41; 59; 26; 41; 58i, a sorting algorithm
returns as output the sequence h26; 31; 41; 41; 58; 59i. Such an input sequence is
called an instance of the sorting problem. In general, an instance of a problem
consists of the input (satisfying whatever constraints are imposed in the problem
statement) needed to compute a solution to the problem.
6 Chapter 1 The Role of Algorithms in Computing

Because many programs use it as an intermediate step, sorting is a fundamental

operation in computer science. As a result, we have a large number of good sorting
algorithms at our disposal. Which algorithm is best for a given application depends
on—among other factors—the number of items to be sorted, the extent to which
the items are already somewhat sorted, possible restrictions on the item values,
the architecture of the computer, and the kind of storage devices to be used: main
memory, disks, or even tapes.
An algorithm is said to be correct if, for every input instance, it halts with the
correct output. We say that a correct algorithm solves the given computational
problem. An incorrect algorithm might not halt at all on some input instances, or it
might halt with an incorrect answer. Contrary to what you might expect, incorrect
algorithms can sometimes be useful, if we can control their error rate. We shall see
an example of an algorithm with a controllable error rate in Chapter 31 when we
study algorithms for finding large prime numbers. Ordinarily, however, we shall
be concerned only with correct algorithms.
An algorithm can be specified in English, as a computer program, or even as
a hardware design. The only requirement is that the specification must provide a
precise description of the computational procedure to be followed.

What kinds of problems are solved by algorithms?

Sorting is by no means the only computational problem for which algorithms have
been developed. (You probably suspected as much when you saw the size of this
book.) Practical applications of algorithms are ubiquitous and include the follow-
ing examples:
! The Human Genome Project has made great progress toward the goals of iden-
tifying all the 100,000 genes in human DNA, determining the sequences of the
3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, storing this informa-
tion in databases, and developing tools for data analysis. Each of these steps
requires sophisticated algorithms. Although the solutions to the various prob-
lems involved are beyond the scope of this book, many methods to solve these
biological problems use ideas from several of the chapters in this book, thereby
enabling scientists to accomplish tasks while using resources efficiently. The
savings are in time, both human and machine, and in money, as more informa-
tion can be extracted from laboratory techniques.
! The Internet enables people all around the world to quickly access and retrieve
large amounts of information. With the aid of clever algorithms, sites on the
Internet are able to manage and manipulate this large volume of data. Examples
of problems that make essential use of algorithms include finding good routes
on which the data will travel (techniques for solving such problems appear in
1.1 Algorithms 7

Chapter 24), and using a search engine to quickly find pages on which particular
information resides (related techniques are in Chapters 11 and 32).
! Electronic commerce enables goods and services to be negotiated and ex-
changed electronically, and it depends on the privacy of personal informa-
tion such as credit card numbers, passwords, and bank statements. The core
technologies used in electronic commerce include public-key cryptography and
digital signatures (covered in Chapter 31), which are based on numerical algo-
rithms and number theory.
! Manufacturing and other commercial enterprises often need to allocate scarce
resources in the most beneficial way. An oil company may wish to know where
to place its wells in order to maximize its expected profit. A political candidate
may want to determine where to spend money buying campaign advertising in
order to maximize the chances of winning an election. An airline may wish
to assign crews to flights in the least expensive way possible, making sure that
each flight is covered and that government regulations regarding crew schedul-
ing are met. An Internet service provider may wish to determine where to place
additional resources in order to serve its customers more effectively. All of
these are examples of problems that can be solved using linear programming,
which we shall study in Chapter 29.
Although some of the details of these examples are beyond the scope of this
book, we do give underlying techniques that apply to these problems and problem
areas. We also show how to solve many specific problems, including the following:
! We are given a road map on which the distance between each pair of adjacent
intersections is marked, and we wish to determine the shortest route from one
intersection to another. The number of possible routes can be huge, even if we
disallow routes that cross over themselves. How do we choose which of all
possible routes is the shortest? Here, we model the road map (which is itself
a model of the actual roads) as a graph (which we will meet in Part VI and
Appendix B), and we wish to find the shortest path from one vertex to another
in the graph. We shall see how to solve this problem efficiently in Chapter 24.
! We are given two ordered sequences of symbols, X D hx1 ; x2 ; : : : ; xm i and
Y D hy1 ; y2 ; : : : ; yn i, and we wish to find a longest common subsequence of
X and Y . A subsequence of X is just X with some (or possibly all or none) of
its elements removed. For example, one subsequence of hA; B; C; D; E; F; Gi
would be hB; C; E; Gi. The length of a longest common subsequence of X
and Y gives one measure of how similar these two sequences are. For example,
if the two sequences are base pairs in DNA strands, then we might consider
them similar if they have a long common subsequence. If X has m symbols
and Y has n symbols, then X and Y have 2m and 2n possible subsequences,
8 Chapter 1 The Role of Algorithms in Computing

respectively. Selecting all possible subsequences of X and Y and matching

them up could take a prohibitively long time unless m and n are very small.
We shall see in Chapter 15 how to use a general technique known as dynamic
programming to solve this problem much more efficiently.
! We are given a mechanical design in terms of a library of parts, where each part
may include instances of other parts, and we need to list the parts in order so
that each part appears before any part that uses it. If the design comprises n
parts, then there are nŠ possible orders, where nŠ denotes the factorial function.
Because the factorial function grows faster than even an exponential function,
we cannot feasibly generate each possible order and then verify that, within
that order, each part appears before the parts using it (unless we have only a
few parts). This problem is an instance of topological sorting, and we shall see
in Chapter 22 how to solve this problem efficiently.
! We are given n points in the plane, and we wish to find the convex hull of
these points. The convex hull is the smallest convex polygon containing the
points. Intuitively, we can think of each point as being represented by a nail
sticking out from a board. The convex hull would be represented by a tight
rubber band that surrounds all the nails. Each nail around which the rubber
band makes a turn is a vertex of the convex hull. (See Figure 33.6 on page 1029
for an example.) Any of the 2n subsets of the points might be the vertices
of the convex hull. Knowing which points are vertices of the convex hull is
not quite enough, either, since we also need to know the order in which they
appear. There are many choices, therefore, for the vertices of the convex hull.
Chapter 33 gives two good methods for finding the convex hull.

These lists are far from exhaustive (as you again have probably surmised from
this book’s heft), but exhibit two characteristics that are common to many interest-
ing algorithmic problems:
1. They have many candidate solutions, the overwhelming majority of which do
not solve the problem at hand. Finding one that does, or one that is “best,” can
present quite a challenge.
2. They have practical applications. Of the problems in the above list, finding the
shortest path provides the easiest examples. A transportation firm, such as a
trucking or railroad company, has a financial interest in finding shortest paths
through a road or rail network because taking shorter paths results in lower
labor and fuel costs. Or a routing node on the Internet may need to find the
shortest path through the network in order to route a message quickly. Or a
person wishing to drive from New York to Boston may want to find driving
directions from an appropriate Web site, or she may use her GPS while driving.
1.1 Algorithms 9

Not every problem solved by algorithms has an easily identified set of candidate
solutions. For example, suppose we are given a set of numerical values represent-
ing samples of a signal, and we want to compute the discrete Fourier transform of
these samples. The discrete Fourier transform converts the time domain to the fre-
quency domain, producing a set of numerical coefficients, so that we can determine
the strength of various frequencies in the sampled signal. In addition to lying at
the heart of signal processing, discrete Fourier transforms have applications in data
compression and multiplying large polynomials and integers. Chapter 30 gives
an efficient algorithm, the fast Fourier transform (commonly called the FFT), for
this problem, and the chapter also sketches out the design of a hardware circuit to
compute the FFT.

Data structures
This book also contains several data structures. A data structure is a way to store
and organize data in order to facilitate access and modifications. No single data
structure works well for all purposes, and so it is important to know the strengths
and limitations of several of them.

Technique
Although you can use this book as a “cookbook” for algorithms, you may someday
encounter a problem for which you cannot readily find a published algorithm (many
of the exercises and problems in this book, for example). This book will teach you
techniques of algorithm design and analysis so that you can develop algorithms on
your own, show that they give the correct answer, and understand their efficiency.
Different chapters address different aspects of algorithmic problem solving. Some
chapters address specific problems, such as finding medians and order statistics in
Chapter 9, computing minimum spanning trees in Chapter 23, and determining a
maximum flow in a network in Chapter 26. Other chapters address techniques,
such as divide-and-conquer in Chapter 4, dynamic programming in Chapter 15,
and amortized analysis in Chapter 17.

Hard problems
Most of this book is about efficient algorithms. Our usual measure of efficiency
is speed, i.e., how long an algorithm takes to produce its result. There are some
problems, however, for which no efficient solution is known. Chapter 34 studies
an interesting subset of these problems, which are known as NP-complete.
Why are NP-complete problems interesting? First, although no efficient algo-
rithm for an NP-complete problem has ever been found, nobody has ever proven
10 Chapter 1 The Role of Algorithms in Computing

that an efficient algorithm for one cannot exist. In other words, no one knows
whether or not efficient algorithms exist for NP-complete problems. Second, the
set of NP-complete problems has the remarkable property that if an efficient algo-
rithm exists for any one of them, then efficient algorithms exist for all of them. This
relationship among the NP-complete problems makes the lack of efficient solutions
all the more tantalizing. Third, several NP-complete problems are similar, but not
identical, to problems for which we do know of efficient algorithms. Computer
scientists are intrigued by how a small change to the problem statement can cause
a big change to the efficiency of the best known algorithm.
You should know about NP-complete problems because some of them arise sur-
prisingly often in real applications. If you are called upon to produce an efficient
algorithm for an NP-complete problem, you are likely to spend a lot of time in a
fruitless search. If you can show that the problem is NP-complete, you can instead
spend your time developing an efficient algorithm that gives a good, but not the
best possible, solution.
As a concrete example, consider a delivery company with a central depot. Each
day, it loads up each delivery truck at the depot and sends it around to deliver goods
to several addresses. At the end of the day, each truck must end up back at the depot
so that it is ready to be loaded for the next day. To reduce costs, the company wants
to select an order of delivery stops that yields the lowest overall distance traveled
by each truck. This problem is the well-known “traveling-salesman problem,” and
it is NP-complete. It has no known efficient algorithm. Under certain assumptions,
however, we know of efficient algorithms that give an overall distance which is
not too far above the smallest possible. Chapter 35 discusses such “approximation
algorithms.”

Parallelism
For many years, we could count on processor clock speeds increasing at a steady
rate. Physical limitations present a fundamental roadblock to ever-increasing clock
speeds, however: because power density increases superlinearly with clock speed,
chips run the risk of melting once their clock speeds become high enough. In order
to perform more computations per second, therefore, chips are being designed to
contain not just one but several processing “cores.” We can liken these multicore
computers to several sequential computers on a single chip; in other words, they are
a type of “parallel computer.” In order to elicit the best performance from multicore
computers, we need to design algorithms with parallelism in mind. Chapter 27
presents a model for “multithreaded” algorithms, which take advantage of multiple
cores. This model has advantages from a theoretical standpoint, and it forms the
basis of several successful computer programs, including a championship chess
program.
 1.2 Algorithms as a technology 11

Exercises

1.1-1
Give a real-world example that requires sorting or a real-world example that re-
quires computing a convex hull.

1.1-2
Other than speed, what other measures of efficiency might one use in a real-world
setting?

1.1-3
Select a data structure that you have seen previously, and discuss its strengths and
limitations.

1.1-4
How are the shortest-path and traveling-salesman problems given above similar?
How are they different?

1.1-5
Come up with a real-world problem in which only the best solution will do. Then
come up with one in which a solution that is “approximately” the best is good
enough.

1.2 Algorithms as a technology

Suppose computers were infinitely fast and computer memory was free. Would
you have any reason to study algorithms? The answer is yes, if for no other reason
than that you would still like to demonstrate that your solution method terminates
and does so with the correct answer.
If computers were infinitely fast, any correct method for solving a problem
would do. You would probably want your implementation to be within the bounds
of good software engineering practice (for example, your implementation should
be well designed and documented), but you would most often use whichever
method was the easiest to implement.
Of course, computers may be fast, but they are not infinitely fast. And memory
may be inexpensive, but it is not free. Computing time is therefore a bounded
resource, and so is space in memory. You should use these resources wisely, and
algorithms that are efficient in terms of time or space will help you do so.