● Ambiguous means that there could be multiple interpretations to an instruction. One person an instruction meant to do one thing; someone else, that it meant to do a different thing.

● Deterministic means the algorithm does the same thing every time. If it is non-deterministic, then even if everyone agrees what should be done (i.e. it is unambiguous) different results can still occur (e.g. throwing a dice – everyone may agree on what this means but when we do it we get a different result so it is unambiguous but non-deterministic).

● Complete means all cases are covered: there is no situation that can arise where the algorithm does not tell you what to do. This could occur if a branching instruction told you what to do if the test was true, but gave no indication of what to do if it was not.

Review: Informatics Year 1 Semester 2