Definition
Effective Computation
Effective computation is computation by a finitely described procedure whose instructions are unambiguous and can be carried out mechanically, without ingenuity or an oracle. Each elementary step requires only finite work.
No fixed bound on runtime or memory is required, and the procedure need not terminate on every input. Effective does not mean efficient.
This is an informal notion, independent of a particular computational model. For computing function values, see effectively computable function.