Introduction to algorithms

There is a term you will come across in programming called an algorithm and when…you hear it described, it sounds similar to a program itself.…An algorithm is a series of steps to accomplish a task, but usually when we are…talking about it in programming,…we mean a small procedure, part of a program, rather than the whole program…itself. Perhaps even just a function.…Yes, it does something specific, but there is an understanding that there may be…many different ways to accomplish the same task, many different algorithms.…

So let me give you an example.…Let's say we have a series of numbers we need to sort. It could be 5.…It could be 5000.…Now, there is a whole bunch of different ways we could do this, but here is one of them.…I am going to compare two numbers at a time.…So I will take the first two numbers and compare them.…If the first one is bigger than the second, I am going to flip them.…Then I will move up and I'll compare the next two.…Again, if the first is bigger than the second, we will flip them.…