Читать книгу Algorithms For Dummies - John Paul Mueller, John Mueller Paul, Luca Massaron - Страница 18

Part of solving problem using an algorithm has nothing to do with processing power, creative thinking outside the box, or anything of a physical nature. To create a solution to most problems, you also need data on which to base a conclusion. For example, in the toast-making algorithm, you need to know about the availability of bread, a toaster, electricity to power the toaster, and so on before you can solve the problem of actually making toast. The data becomes important because you can’t finish the algorithm when missing even one element of the required solution. Of course, you may need additional input data as well. For example, the person wanting the toast may not like rye. If this is the case and all you have is rye bread to use, the presence of bread still won’t result in a successful result.

Data comes from all sorts of sources and in all kinds of forms. You can stream data from a source such as a real-time monitor, access a public data source, rely on private data in a database, scrape the data from websites, or get it in myriad other ways too numerous to mention here. The data may be static (unchanging) or dynamic (constantly changing). You may find that the data is complete or missing elements. The data may not appear in the right form (such as when you get imperial units and require metric units when solving a weight problem). The data may appear in a tabular format when you need it in some other form. It may reside in an unstructured way (for instance, in a NoSQL database or just in a bunch of different data files) when you need the formatting of a relational database. In short, you need to know all sorts of things about the data used with your algorithm in order to solve problems with it.

Because data comes in so many forms and you need to work with it in so many ways, this book pays a lot of attention to data. Starting in Chapter 6, you discover just how data structure comes into play. Moving on to Chapter 7, you begin looking at how to search through data to find what you need. Chapters 12 through 14 help you work with big data. However, you can find some sort of data-specific information in just about every chapter of the book because without data, an algorithm can’t solve any problems.