Expanded Explanation
Algorithms are the recipes that software follows to solve problems — from sorting a list to finding the shortest route in a map. They are analysed by correctness and by how their time and memory usage grow with the input size.
Simple explanation
A recipe: do this, then that, then check something, then do something else — repeat until you get the answer.
Simple Examples
- Binary search on a sorted list.
- Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest paths.
- PageRank for ranking web pages.