FOM: accessibility of "algorithm"

[jshipman@bloomberg.net]

The students in that "Introduction to the University" course
may have had trouble understanding computation with cellular
automata, but practically all high schools teach computer
programming nowadays and I can't believe that typical college
freshmen, even today, don't understand what computer programming
basically is.  (Even if they have not taken a programming
course.)  The invariance of the notion of what is programmable
is surprising and slightly harder to explain, but even this is
not really essential for understanding a statement like "no
computer program can identify which equations are solvable in
integers".  -- Joe Shipman