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The Design and Analysis of Simple Algorithms

Allan Borodin, University of Toronto, addresses the question, "Is it time to make algorithm design more of a computer science?" A basic course in Computer Science undergraduate and graduate programs is "The Design and Analysis of Algorithms" or "Introduction to Algorithms." Looking at such course descriptions, syllabus, and textbooks, one can infer that an organizational theme is often in terms of "basic algorithmic paradigms." Maybe it is just that time does not permit us to illustrate many such paradigms or maybe there are not that many to illustrate. In any case, even though we usually "cover" very few such general techniques in our courses, we rarely if ever try to precisely define such algorithmic concepts and hence cannot rigorously address the question as to their power and limitations. Within the field of Operations Research there have been attempts to formally model and study dynamic programming and branch and bound algorithms but this work has been largely ignored in Computer Science.