Slashdot Mirror
Knuth's Fascicle 3b Available
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Knuth is making progress on volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming. Another fascicle is available. More news here."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
And if reading the fascicle is too heavy going, remember that you can watch the movies instead, at http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/. Fourteen videos of Knuth's lectures are aavailable, inclusing last years's "Tenth Annual Christmas Tree Lecture: Finding All Spanning Trees".
I watched the Tenth Annual Christmas Tree lecture live (the "trees", of course, being various computer science graphs and structures, not pine trees hung with colored lights) and found it surprisingly engaging and accessible even to an educated lay-person. If you have any interest in computer science or algorithm design, it's a fascinating way to spend an hour. (Disclaimer: I'd just watched the 1998 lecture to better understand Garsia-Wachs coding.)
I was so excited about watching it live that I submitted the Knuth Christmas lecture as a story about it to Slashdot, but the editors didn't think it important enough to accept. (Nor the story on "brain fingerprinting" -- a kind of polygraph based on direct reading of brain waves -- casting doubt on a death sentence, nor Eagle's drummer Don Henley's op-ed piece in the Washington Post attacking the music industry and ruminating on p2p, nor the story about Anglo-German scientific rivalry and the resulting pickled baby "dragon".)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The Community should write Knuth's Art of Computer Programming? The series people have enough trouble *reading*?
This is perhaps the finest troll of all time.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
I hope you're joking.
Have you tried reading TAoCP? This is not some computer book but is an in-depth study of all the mathematics that Computer Science comprises. Some of the exercies would serve as topics for a PhD thesis (and are marked as such).
Suffice it to say that writing these books is not an easy task and I'm not sure if the series will ever get finished. I'm still on the first volume, so I don't know if I'll ever finish the series. Even though wikipedia shows us that a community effort can produce some good writing, I doubt it could ever produce something as in-depth as TAoCP.
And besides this, I think Addison-Wesley would have something to say about putting TAoCP in public domain.
general question:
His publication schedule appears to be 2007 for Volume 4, 2010 for Volume 5, plus other work following that. I'm a little concerned about his age. I dont know how old he is, but he is retired and seems to have been for quite some time. Will he live long enough to actually finish Vol 5?
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The community can help already. Download the fasciles and comb them for errors, as is explicitly requested on Knuth's news page.
See also his help wanted page.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Some of the exercies would serve as topics for a PhD thesis (and are marked as such).
Like the one that asks: Prove that there is no solution for a^n+b^n=c^n for n>2
how long until
He's only 75.
;-)
cLive
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Stanford are going to hate us - direct linking to a 600K PostScript in the article.
Don't click on it unless you actually plan on taking the time to READ it!
Like the one that asks: Prove that there is no solution for a^n+b^n=c^n for n>2
If only Addison-Wesley would print the volumes of TAoCP with bigger margins, we might have an answer to that already!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Honestly, isn't this a bummer? I'd love to glance them, read a few chapters, and maybe someday I will, but it would be delicious if the text just was on, say, wikipedia or similar.
Knuth doesn't belong on 'Short Attention Span Theatre' (aka the Internet).
---
It's worth noting that a number of Dr. Knuth's books are available insofar as is possible --- look for _The TeXbook_ and _The METAFONTbook_ in particular, also his _Mathematical Writing_, and of course, one can typeset the (Literate Programming) source of tex.web to essentially get the book _TeX: The Program_ (only up-dated ;)
Dr. Knuth has also published some _way_ cool commentary on programs as literate commentary on them, esp. look for his coverage of _The Colossal Cave Adventure_
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I forgot to mention that when I submitted the article.
It also seems that pre-fascicle 2c has been renamed to pre-fascicle 3a.
Seeing that pre-fascicles 2a and 2b total 138 pages and that 3a and 3b total 156 pages, perhaps the "real" fascicles 2 and 3 will shortly arrive (unless fascicle 1 has to be completed first).
By the way, I'd start looking for errors in pre-fascicle 3c, the $2.56 reward applies to pre-fascicles as well. (I got a check from Knuth for one in one of the previous ones -- quite an amazing thing to get one of those famous checks!)
Perhaps they'll publish an 'Art of Computer Programming...For Dummies' someday. :)
Have you ever noticed that all those "The Completely Moronic Idiot's Guide to Teach Yourself The Beginners Art of Computer Programming For Dummies In 24 Hours Made Easy" books have at least a thousand pages, which is a lot more than I can read in twenty-four hours? Makes me wonder if you're even supposed to read them. Perhaps they work by osmosis?
Maybe so, but having the text available means that it's searchable.
Maybe I would want to read a lot of the chapters, if they're as good as I'm told.
For many years, I wondered which volume 4 would come out first, George Lucas' or Knuth's. I'd much rather have had them the other way around!