Google's Alan Warren, right, spoke at the computing symposium

Google doesn't look for brand new ways of tackling problems, according to Alan Warren, Phys 78, the director of engineering.

"Algorithms are kind of at the heart of everything we do at Google," Warren said.

"We try to do as much as humanly possible with a small number of people and as small a number of machines as we can get away with and algorithms are fundamental to that."

Google employees also must be skilled in fundamentals, Warren said during a discussion on large-scale problem solving at the New Face of Computing symposium at Georgia Tech this spring.

"We want very, very smart people with very general skills because we know that when they come into Google they will be working on things they had no chance to be working on as an undergraduate or even as a master's student. They need the fundamental tools so they can come in, learn the context and then start applying it.

"Six months, 12 months later when that project is done and they're going to do something new, they can take those skills and tools and apply them to a new problem. If they come in overly channeled on one particular area, they aren't as generally applicable and they aren't going to be able to dynamically flow," he said.

"Those core mathematics courses, those core algorithms courses, there are a lot of ways to apply those. It's not something you're going to learn and then put the book away and not apply again. Algorithms and algorithmic approaches are everywhere out there and there are a huge number of problems to apply them against."