High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computer science, a holographic algorithm is an algorithm that uses a holographic reduction. A holographic reduction is a constant-time reduction that maps solution fragments many-to-many such that the sum of the solution fragments remains unchanged. These concepts were introduced by Leslie Valiant, who called them holographic because "their effect can be viewed as that of producing interference patterns among the solution fragments." The algorithms are unrelated to laser holography, except metaphorically. Their power comes from the mutual cancellation of many contributions to a sum, analogous to the interference patterns in a hologram.