Relationship between problem and algorithm

Problem can be defined as the task to be performed. The execution of the task to be performed can be divided primarily into two components:

• Data
• Algorithm

However, there could be other controlling factors which could affect your approach development, such as problem constraints, resource constraints, computation time allowed, and so on.

The data component of the problem represents the information we are dealing with, such as numbers, text, files, and so on. For example, let's assume we want to maintain the company employee records, which include the employee name and their associated work details. This data needs to be maintained and updated regularly.

The algorithm part of a problem represents more of implementation details. It entails how we are going to manage the current data. Depending on the data and problem requirements, we select the data structure. Depending on the data structure, we have to define the algorithm to manage the dataset. For example, we can store the company employees dataset into a linked list or dictionary. Based on the defined data structure to store data approach for searching, insertion, and deletion and so on operations performed on data structure changes which is control by algorithms and implemented as program. Thus, we could state that a program is the step-by-step instructions given to a computer to do some operations:

Program = f(Algorithm, Data Structure)

To summarize, we could state that a program is the group of step-by-step instructions to solve a defined problem using the algorithm selected considering all problems and resource constraints. This book will use program representations using R to demonstrate the implementation of different data structures and algorithms.