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Concept
Algorithm engineering
Summary
Algorithm engineering focuses on the design, analysis, implementation, optimization, profiling and experimental evaluation of computer algorithms, bridging the gap between algorithm theory and practical applications of algorithms in software engineering.
It is a general methodology for algorithmic research.
In 1995, a report from an NSF-sponsored workshop "with the purpose of assessing the current goals and directions of the Theory of Computing (TOC) community" identified the slow speed of adoption of theoretical insights by practitioners as an important issue and suggested measures to
reduce the uncertainty by practitioners whether a certain theoretical breakthrough will translate into practical gains in their field of work, and
tackle the lack of ready-to-use algorithm libraries, which provide stable, bug-free and well-tested implementations for algorithmic problems and expose an easy-to-use interface for library consumers.
But also, promising algorithmic approaches have been neglected due to difficulties in mathematical analysis.
The term "algorithm engineering" was first used with specificity in 1997, with the first Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE97), organized by Giuseppe F. Italiano.
Algorithm engineering does not intend to replace or compete with algorithm theory, but tries to enrich, refine and reinforce its formal approaches with experimental algorithmics (also called empirical algorithmics).
This way it can provide new insights into the efficiency and performance of algorithms in cases where
the algorithm at hand is less amenable to algorithm theoretic analysis,
formal analysis pessimistically suggests bounds which are unlikely to appear on inputs of practical interest,
the algorithm relies on the intricacies of modern hardware architectures like data locality, branch prediction, instruction stalls, instruction latencies which the machine model used in Algorithm Theory is unable to capture in the required detail,
the crossover between competing algorithms with different constant costs and asymptotic behaviors needs to be determined.
Official source
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