Effectiveness vs efficiency of algorithms

Question

Please can someone tell me what the effectiveness of an algorithm relates to? I understand what the efficiency component entails

thanks

Answer 1

Effectiveness relates to the ability to produce the desired result.

Some tasks inherently do not have strict definitions - for example, machine translation between two human languages. Different algorithms exist to translate, say, from English to Spanish; their effectiveness is a measure of how good are the results that these algorithms produce. Their efficiency , on the other hand, measure how fast they are at producing the results, how much memory they use, how much disk space they need, etc.

Answer 2

This question suggests that you have read something which refers to the effectiveness of algorithms and have not understood the author's explanation of the term -- if the author has provided one. I don't think that there is a generally accepted interpretation of the term, I think it is one of those terms which falls under the Humpty-Dumpty rule 'a word means what I say it means'.

It might refer to an aspect of some algorithms which return only approximate solutions to problems. For example, we all know that the travelling salesman problem has NP time complexity, an actual algorithm which 'solves' the TSP might provide some bounds on the difference between the solutions it can find and an optimal solution which might take too long to find.