Using spreadsheet languages to understand sequence analysis algorithms

Spreadsheet languages have gained enormous popularity for simple numerical computations, but their power in non-numerical contexts has not been widely recognized. This paper presents spreadsheet implementations of several familiar sequence analysis tools. In many cases, spreadsheet notation clarifies the underlying algorithm, facilitating understanding of existing algorithms and promoting spontaneous experimentation. Spreadsheets also reveal, through their visible parallelism, opportunities for applying parallel processors to computationally challenging problems.