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A famous definition of computer science by Gibbs and Tucker (Gibbs and Tucker, ???A Model Curriculum
for a Liberal Arts Degree in Computer Science,??? Comm. of the ACM, vol. 29, no. 3, March 1986) emphasizes
algorithm development and analysis as the central focus of computer science.
It??™s also a fair question to ask, ???How is computer science a science???? In contrast to physics, biology, and
chemistry, computer science is not based on the study of the natural world. In that sense, computer science is
more like mathematics than science. Some argue that computer science is really computer art (where ???art???
means practice). On the other hand, computer scientists do use the scientific method to propose and test
hypotheses, and some very nonobvious discoveries in computer science have important real-world implications.
An example, which we will discuss later, is the discovery that some important problems simply cannot be solved
by computation.
Despite many variations, essentially all definitions of computer science emphasize the study of algorithms.
Algorithms, in one form or another, are central to computer science. Computer science combines the theoretical
concepts of algorithm design and analysis with the practical considerations of how to implement algorithms on
a computer and solve practical problems.
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