On the Formalization of the Notion of a Concurrent Algorithm

Previous papers give accounts of quests for satisfactory formalizations of the classical informal notion of an algorithm and the contemporary informal notion of an interactive algoritm. In this paper, an attempt is made to generalize the results of the former quest to the contemporary informal notion of a concurrent algorithm. The notion of a concurrent proto-algorithm is introduced. The thought is that concurrent algorithms are equivalence classes of concurrent proto-algorithms under an appropriate equivalence relation. As in the previous papers referred to above, three equivalence relations are defined. Two of them are deemed to be bounds for an appropriate equivalence relation and the third is likely an appropriate one. The connection between concurrency and non-determinism in the presented setting is also addressed.