The general notion of an algorithm as an independent (separate) concept

Abstract

The most important discovery in the algorithmics was undoubtedly the discovery of the general notion of an algorithm as a new and separate entity. We emphasize that this discovery should not be confused with the discovery of representative computational models (constructed by Turing, Post, Markov, Kolmogorov); they will be discussed in chap. 1.2. Sometimes it is wrongly believed that the concept of an algorithm cannot be well understood without certain formal constructions (people saying this usually have in mind computational models mentioned above). But these constructions were suggested as a formal explication of the notion of algorithm (or, better to say, computable function) — therefore the notion of algorithm was considered as existing independently of (and before) these constructions.