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To uphold the quality of Wikipedia:Good articles, all articles listed as Good articles are being reviewed against the GA criteria as part of the GA project quality task force. While all the hard work that has gone into this article is appreciated, unfortunately, as of February 17, 2010, this article fails to satisfy the criteria, as detailed below. For that reason, the article has been delisted from WP:GA. However, if improvements are made bringing the article up to standards, the article may be nominated at WP:GAN. If you feel this decision has been made in error, you may seek remediation at WP:GAR.

Reviewer: --Malleus Fatuorum 17:04, 17 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Prose

• Much of the article has an editorial tone that appears to be presenting the opinion of the author rather than objectively verified facts. A few examples:
  • "J. Barkley Rosser boldly defined an ‘effective [mathematical] method’ in the following manner ...". Who says it's a "bold" definition? Bold in what way?
  • "Here is a remarkable coincidence of two men not knowing each other but describing a process of men-as-computers working on computations ...". Who says it's a "remarkable coincidence"?
  • "Given the prevalence of Morse code and telegraphy, ticker tape machines, and Teletypes we might conjecture that all were influences." Who is doing the conjecturing?
  • "While there is no generally accepted formal definition of 'algorithm,' an informal definition could be 'a process that performs some sequence of operations.'" Is that a quotation? If so, from whom?

• There are three "original research" tags and two "dubious" tags, outstanding since September 2009.

Etymology

• Uncited.

Why algorithms are necessary

• "A prototypical example of an algorithm is Euclid's algorithm ...". In what way can Euclid's algorithm be considered a prototype?

• Despite its title this section, which is largely unsourced, does not deal with why algorithms are necessary but attempts to define what is meant by "algorithm".

Formal versus empirical

• This section has been flagged as in need of expansion since last September, and is uncited.

• "For instance an algorithm that has no locality of reference may have much poorer performance than predicted because it 'thrashes the cache'". Is "thrashes the cache" a quotation? If so it needs to be attributed. If not, then why the scare quotes?

By complexity

• "Owing to this, it was found to be more suitable to classify the problems themselves instead of the algorithms into equivalence classes based on the complexity of the best possible algorithms for them." By whom was that classification found to be more suitable?

Termination

• The discussion in this section is at odds with the informal definition of algorithm given in the lead: "a computation that proceeds through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in a final ending state."

Mechanical contrivances with discrete states

• "Telephone-switching networks of electromechanical relays (invented 1835) was behind the work of George Stibitz (1937)...".

Quantum algorithms

• Mentioned in the See also section, but a strange omission in this article.