© 1977 by British Computer Society
The algebraic anatomy of programs

1 Department of Statistics and Computer Science, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA, 2 Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA
Game playing and backtracking programs among others can be understood in terms of algebraic operations with zeros. The special properties of the algebraic operations can be used to explain the equivalence of otherwise dissimilar algorithms.
Received April 1976.
* Currrent address: Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Department of Statistics and Computer Science, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware 19711, USA