DCIT 204

10869753

Two ideas changed the world. In 1448, a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg in the city of Mainz,
Germany, discovered how to assemble movable metal parts to print books. Many historians say we owe
everything for typography. The key development wasn't the typography, it was the algorithm. Though
many forms of calculations have stayed over the centuries. Textbooks have proven to be the most
influential medium of communication. Written in Arabic by a man of Baghdad in the 9th century, Al
Khwarizmi, the basic methods of adding, multiplying and dividing numbers, even extracting squares
were discovered. Compute the roots and digits of pi. These procedures are precise, clear, mechanical
and efficient, Accurate - In short, they are algorithms, a term later coined to honor the sages. The
decimal system was eventually adopted in Europe many centuries later.

No other sequence has been so extensively studied and applied to so many fields. Biology, demography,
art, architecture, music and more. and along with powers of 2, computer science's favorite sequence. In
fact, Fibonacci numbers grow almost as fast as powers of two. Confirmed that sloppy analysis of runtime
can lead to unacceptable results. Insightful analysis is based on good simplifications. Expressing
execution time in terms of basic computer steps is already an oversimplification. For this purpose,
execution times are always expressed in counts. The number of basic computer steps as a function of
the size of the input. And this simplification leads to another thing. Given an input of size n, for 3 + 4n +
3 steps, it is much easier to omit the low order terms such that the algorithm takes O(n) time Execution
times of two algorithms for inputs of size n