From determining the cheapest way to make a hot dog to monitoring the workings of a factory, there are many complex computational problems to be solved. Before executable code can be produced, computer scientists need to be able to design the algorithms that lie behind the code, be able to understand and describe such algorithms abstractly, and be confident that they work correctly and efficiently. These are the goals of computer scientists.

A Computational Problem: A specification of a computational problem uses pre-conditions and post-conditions to describe for each legal input instance that the computation might receive, what the required output or actions are. This may be a function mapping each input instance to the required output. It may be an optimization problem which requires a solution to be outputted that is “optimal” from among a huge set of possible solutions for the given input instance. It may also be an ongoing system or data structure that responds appropriately to a constant stream of input.

Example: The sorting problem is defined as follows:

1. Preconditions: The input is a list of n values, including possible repetitions.

2. Postconditions: The output is a list consisting of the same n values in non-decreasing order.

An Algorithm: An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure which, starting with an input instance, produces a suitable output. It is described at the level of detail and abstraction best suited to the human audience that must understand it. In contrast, code is an implementation of an algorithm that can be executed by a computer. Pseudocode lies between these two.