1.1 Concept of algorithm

A common man’s belief is that a computer can do anything and everything that he imagines. It is very difficult to make people realize that it is not really the computer but the man behind computer who does everything.

In the modern internet world man feels that just by entering what he wants to search into the computers he can get information as desired by him. He believes that, this is done by computer. A common man seldom understands that a man made procedure called search has done the entire job and the only support provided by the computer is the execution speed and organized storage of information.

In the above instance, a designer of the information system should know what one frequently searches for. He should make a structured organization of all those details to store in memory of the computer. Based on the requirement, the right information is brought out. This is accomplished through a set of instructions created by the designer of the information system to search the right information matching the requirement of the user. This set of instructions is termed as program. It should be evident by now that it is not the computer, which generates automatically the program but it is the designer of the information system who has created this.

Thus, the program is the one, which through the medium of the computer executes to perform all the activities as desired by a user. This implies that programming a computer is more important than the computer itself while solving a problem using a computer and this part of programming has got to be done by the man behind the computer. Even at this stage, one should not quickly jump to a conclusion that coding is programming. Coding is perhaps the last stage in the process of programming. Programming involves various activities form the stage of conceiving the problem upto the stage of creating a model to solve the problem. The formal representation of this model as a sequence of instructions is called an algorithm and coded algorithm in a specific computer language is called a program.

One can now experience that the focus is shifted from computer to computer programming and then to creating an algorithm. This is algorithm design, heart of problem solving.