How are algorithms and data structures related to Turing Machines?

My copy of The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms has arrived today. In the first chapter, the author introduced Turing Machines. I have two other algorithms textbooks, Introduction to Algori开发者_开发技巧thms and The Algorithm Design Manual, but none of them talks about Turing machines, even though they are famous on the subject of algorithms and data structures.

I would like to understand What is the relation between Turing Machine and Algorithm/Datastructure. Is is really important to understand Turing machines to become expert in algorithms?

Turing machines are just theoretical tools to analyze computation, ie. we can specify an algorihm by creating a turing machine which computes it. They are very useful in the study of computability, that is, if it is possible at all to compute a function. Turing machines and several other formal language constructs are discuessed in the classic book by Hopcroft and Ullmann. Turing machines also appear when discussing NP-completeness for instance in this book, by Garey and Johnson.

Both books and turing machines in general are pretty theoretical. If you are interested in algorihhms in an academic way, I'd recommend them. However, if you want a practical understanding of algorihms implemented on real computers and run on real data then I'd say that it's only important to have a cursory understanding of turing machines.

The reason that Turing machines are of importance when describing data structures and algorithms is that they provide a mathematical model in which we can describe what an algorithm is. Most of the time, algorithms are described using high-level language or pseudocode. For example, I might describe an algorithm to find the maximum value in an array like this:

Set max = -infinity
For each element in the array:
    If that element is greater than max:
        Set max equal to that element.

From this description it's easy to see how the algorithm works, and it would be easy to translate it into source code. However, suppose that I had written out this description:

Guess the index at which the maximum element occurs.
Output the element at that position.

Is this a valid algorithm? That is, can we say "guess the index" and rigorously define what it means? If we do allow this, how long will it take to do this? If we don't allow it, why not? What's different about the first description from the second?

In order to have a mathematically rigorous definition of an algorithm, we need to have some formal model of how a computer works and what it can and cannot do. The Turing machine is one common way to formally define computation, though there are others that can be used as well (register machines, string rewriting systems, Church's lambda calculus, etc.) Once we have defined a mathematical model of computation, we can start talking about what sorts of algorithmic descriptions are valid - namely, those that could be implemented using our model of computation.

Many modern algorithms depend critically on the properties of the underlying model of computation. For example, cache-oblivious algorithms assume that the model of computation has some memory buffer of an unknown size and a two-tiered memory. Some algorithms require that the underlying machine be transdichotomous, meaning that the size of a machine word must be at least large enough to hold the size of any problem. Randomized algorithms require a formal definition of randomess and how the machine can use random values. Nondeterministic algorithms require a means of specifying a nondeterministic computation. Algorithms based on circuits must know what circuit primitives are and are not allowed. Quantum computers need a formal definition of what operations are and are not allowed, along with what the definition of an algorithm is given that the output is probabilistic. Distributed algorithms need a formal definition of communication across machines.

In short, it's important to be explicit about what is and is not allowed when describing an algorithm. However, to be a good programmer or to have a solid grasp of algorithms, you don't need to necessarily know Turing machines inside and out, nor do you need to know about the specific details of how you'd encode particular problems using them. What you should know, though, is what the model of computation can and cannot do, and what the cost is per operation. This way, you can reason about how efficient algorithms are, how much of various resources (time, space, memory, communication, randomess, nondeterminism, etc.) they use. But that said, don't panic if you don't understand the underlying model.

There is one other reason to think about the underlying model of computation - discussing its limitations. Every model of computation has its limits, and in some cases you can prove that certain algorithms cannot possibly exist for certain problems, or that any algorithm that would solve some problem necessarily must use some amount of a given resource. The most common example where this comes up in algorithm design the notion of NP-hardness. Some problems are conjectured to be extremely "difficult" to solve, but the formal definitions of what this difficulty is relies on knowledge of Turing machines and nondeterministic Turing machines. Understanding the model is useful in this case because it allows you to reason about the computational feasibility of certain problems.

Hope this helps!