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When are Two Algorithms the Same?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Andreas Blass ,
Nachum Dershowitz  and
Yuri Gurevich
Andreas Blass
Affiliation:
Mathematics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1043, U.S.A.E-mail: ablass@umich.edu
Nachum Dershowitz
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Ramat Aviv, IsraelE-mail: nachum.dershowitz@cs.tau.ac.il
Yuri Gurevich
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Wa 98052, U.S.A.E-mail: gurevich@microsoft.com
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Abstract

People usually regard algorithms as more abstract than the programs that implement them. The natural way to formalize this idea is that algorithms are equivalence classes of programs with respect to a suitable equivalence relation. We argue that no such equivalence relation exists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bulletin of Symbolic Logic , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2009 , pp. 145 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2009

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