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Knuth Releases Another Part of Volume 4
junge_m writes "Donald Knuth has released another of his by now famous pre-fascicles to Volume 4 of his epic:
Pre-fascicle 2c is all about 'Generating all Combinations' supplementing his pre-fascicles 2a and 2b.
Furthermore he challenges us all to do more of his daunting exercises and report our success. He thinks we are way too lazy in this respect! So come on slashdot crowd: Do your homework and get the credit from the grandmaster himself!"
anyone else think ThinkGeek.net needs some 'Absolut Knuthingness' tshirts?
Up until now, I've been quite content to have read none of the 3 volumes of TAoCP; with this 4th volume I'm starting to feel poorly read.
Technically, all programmer types are supposed to be lazy. Personally, I try to keep my code clean and commented because when I come back to it in a month, I know I'll be too lazy to read through it and figure out what I was doing. Also, being lazy aboud doing work is what leads to reduced algorithmic complexity, right?
Necessity is the mother of invention, but laziness is the father.
He thinks we are way too lazy in this respect! So come on slashdot crowd: Do your homework and get the credit from the grandmaster himself!
/. articles].
No no no... He's right [yawns, stretches, checks for new
Why do you pay $2.56 for every error found in your books? 256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar.
Damn, and I thought I was a nerd!
256 equals $100. We're being shafted.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
"...But I must confess that I'm also disappointed to have had absolutely no feedback so far on several of the exercises on which I worked hardest when I was preparing this material. Could it be that (1) you've said nothing about them because I somehow managed to get the details perfect? Or is it that (2) you shy away from the more difficult stuff, being unable to spend more than a few minutes on any particular topic?..."
... or could it be (3) that you'd have to be one crack-smoking codemonkey of a nut to spend your spare time doing exercises which (1) require a superbrain, (2) are boring, (3) your superbrain computer science professor already did a week ago to collect the $0.23 award for the errata report.
I just looked this author up at Amazon. Here is some of his previous work:
The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3
From the Inside Flap
"The bible of all fundamental algorithms and the work that taught many of today's software developers most of what they know about computer programming."-- Byte, Sept 1995
"If you think you're a really good programmer,...read [Knuth's] Art of Computer Programming....You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." -- Bill Gates
This does not sound like it is aimed at the core slashdot crowd, based on the Amazon reviews I am reading. Honestly I have never heard of the guy before. He is without a doubt more for the "hard core" among us. Volume 1 seems to have been written in the 1960's, so this guys been at it a while.
Plenty of reader reviews. Many with comments like:
This timeless classic is bound to make the student (Yes you ought to be a dedicated one..no casual reading here!) proficient in the art and science of constructing programs. -Ganapathy Subramaniam
Be prepared for your brain to do some crunching if you really want to get into this guys work.
-Pete
(amazon affilate like to the book...just so ya know.)
Soccer Goal Plans
I was actually hoping for this.
I was poking around Knuth's site, looking at the instruction set for MMIX , when I came across this instruction (SR, SRU added for comparison):
3C SR shift right (1) rA
3D SRI Stanford Research Institute (2) rA
3E SRU shift right unsigned (1)
What's that do then?
decoding the octacode
Gray binary clusters of subcubes
medians of bit strings
Gray fields
constructing large-gap codes
an infinite Gray path that fills n-dimensional space
loopless generation of fence-poset ideals
Isn't this the guy who invented the expression
He wasn't happy with the typesetting on his first book, and decided this should be done by computer, so he wrote a markup language for typesetting.
Why spend 10 days doing something when you can spend 10 years automating it?
(If you don't approve profoundly with the above sentence you don't belong to the software development profession.)
A friend of mine suggested printing post-it notes with Java code to paste over MIX code in the tAoCP.
Suggesting that Knuth should implement his algorithms in Java is the strongest argument for MIX I've ever heard.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.