> I don't understand why you people act like you're stumped by literally, literally page 1 of computer science.

… and yet you didn't stop for a moment to consider that in a field as fast-moving as computer science, a concept which might not have had a formal definition in 1967 acquired one in the past 59 years? See, for example, Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation, which has an entire section (3.3 in my 1997 print) titled “The Definiton of Algorithm”.

Yes, did you read that section? It's using different terminology but it's saying exactly what I'm saying (of course it does, it's elementary computer science). There is no accepted definition of the word "algorithm": there wasn't one in 1967, there wasn't one in 1997 and there isn't one in 2026. There are models of computations we can prove to be equivalent to each other, but no commonly accepted definition that captures the way we use the word in normal speech.