This course is called Foundations of Computer Science. Most of this semester we'll concentrate our efforts on writing software, especially learning strategies for attacking problems using computational methods. Today, however, we'll be looking in-depth into how computers carry out their instructions.
Computers are basically like pocket calculators.
The only things that they can do is carry out their hardware capabilities, and those capabilities are some very simple operations like store a number, copy a number, or add two numbers together. A program is nothing more than a series of instructions that you are issuing to a machine to get carried out at the hardware level. It is the job of software to translate your statements into machine language that the machine can carry out in hardware. For this assignment, we will be looking at how a computer might perform a complex mathematical operation like taking the square root of a number, when all it can do are some simple machine language operations. The program to perform the square root is given in the table below.