Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Vol. 4

_mutators writes "bookpool.com has posted an excerpt from Knuth's long awaited The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 4. It is very short and discusses combinatorial searching. But when will it be published? Bookpool does not hazard a guess."

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Additional information

[HyperChicken]

The books homepage, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.ht ml offers the fascicle for download for free. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1.ps .gz You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.

Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz

It's been a while.

[robbyjo]

It's been a while. Dr. Knuth already finished pre-fascicle 4. Get it here. It's far from done (well, according to his plan).

Re:Many own, few read

[fm6]

I seem to recall reading that TAOCP was originally intended as a single volume. The project grew, because computer science grew as fast as Knuth could write. In the late 70s, Knuth joked that people should please stop doing any research, so he could finish the series!

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!

Re:Question

[rsidd]

Well, there's been cases of repeated last names in science... I just never thought that a person both prominent and low-profile (who in here has studied information theory and text searching algorithms?) would appear on a popular site such as /.

Well, here's another reason he'd appear on Slashdot: he wrote TeX, which is even today the best free typesetting system. And it beats every commercial typesetting system for typesetting mathematics, which Microsoft, Adobe and others don't have a clue about after 20 years of research (indeed, most scientific publishers use TeX/LaTeX). You'll find it on your linux box: among other things, GNU TeXinfo uses it for printable manuals.

And yes, that's still the same Knuth -- he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the publishers' typesetting of TAOCP.

Re:Kill Yr Idols: Donald Knuth

[daniel_mcl]

"It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem..."

As will be learned in an introductory course in computer science, a key property of the Halting Problem is that it cannot be solved by a language which is only Turing-complete (isomorphic to a Turing machine). There is thus a strong inclination to believe that you do not, in fact, know what the halting problem is and have just inserted a term which you have at some point heard used in conjunction with Turing machines into your essay in a failed attempt to impart a touch of intellectual sophistication. This calls the rest of the piece into question as well; how many times did you gamble on something you didn't understand an manage to produce a brief allusion which is not visibly incorrect?

"... results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word..."

If your assertion is that Times New Roman and Courier are better-looking than Computer Modern, you're putting yourself at odds with industry and academia alike. It's a noble attempt to take up the mantle of Gallileo, but you must remember than in order to be persecuted for being right one must first be right.

TeX is the best mathematical typesetting system available today, and is used for all major mathematical journals for this reason. As TeX is generally used to produce postscript output, it's quite easy to make use of any postscript font one wishes, but computer modern should really suffice in most cases.

"Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony..."

The first movement of Shubert's unfinished symphony stands on its own, almost as a sort of program piece, and this is why the symphony is so popular. Nobody expects a third movement, and indeed very few particularly care for the second.

Having shown a complete lack of the most basic knowledge in relation to mathematics, computers, music, literature, and several other areas of knowledge, you should strongly consider returning to school and completing your high school degree in order to help you form coherent, relevant essays if you wish to further pursue book criticism.