Dive Into Algorithms

2 Algorithms in History

Most people associate algorithms with computers. This is not unreasonable; computer operating systems use many sophisticated algorithms, and programming is well suited to implementing all sorts of algorithms precisely. But algorithms are more fundamental than the computer architecture we implement them on. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the word algorithm dates back about a millennium, and algorithms have been described in ancient records going back much further than that. Even outside of written records, there is abundant evidence for the use of complex algorithms in the ancient world—in, for example, their construction ...