Sec. 1.1: Algorithms

Section 1.1, Algorithms, is an introduction to the ideas of the book. It’s interesting to see how Knuth wrote the book in a time when computers were not widespread, and he thought about a target audience of people with little programming experience. He even explains what a variable assignment is. Nowadays no one would recomend TAoCP for beginners, so very few people will read this section without knowing how assignment works, or how to read an algorithm. 

By the end of the section Knuth shows briefly how to formalize the notion of algorithm mathematically, employing Markov algorithms. This was interesting, because although I had seen Markov algorithms before (in Curry’s Fountations of Mathematical Logic), I didn’t really play with them. I ended up writing programs in Haskell and Scala to simulate an algorithm expressed with the notation as presented by Knuth, so I could check if I was getting it right. Later I’ll be posting the code here; first let’s see if I can get syntax highlighting working for these two languages.