
255
Chapter 27
The Design of
Computer Algorithms
As described in Chapter 18, computers were traditionally built to calculate
the solution to numerical problems such as the determination of the roots
of an algebraic equation, or to process numerical data, e.g., the statistical
calculation of national consensus data. However, for the last 40 years or
more, a great deal of important work has also been done by computers
for nonnumerical problems, such as sorting, searching, word or language
processing, and solving combinatorial problems in soware development,
data communication, and the simulation of various biological, chemical,
and physical process ...