Slashdot Mirror
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."
Emetophilia
... it aroused powerful emotions, and the emetophile later called upon these emotions for purpose of sexual gratification." (Frequently Asked Questions about Vomiting (http://emetophobia.bravepages.com/vomiting.html))
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Emetophilia is a sexual fetish in which an individual is aroused by vomiting or observing others vomit. There are different levels of emetophilia. Most only discuss their vomiting and that of other people, as in Internet story boards. Many others collect pictures of people vomiting, and the most extreme emetophiles make these pictures and videos. When people carry emetophilia to an extreme by actually vomiting, especially on a partner, it is called a Roman shower, after the frequent induction of vomiting at Roman feasts.
An online site theorizes, "vomiting was probably something either arousing or frightening to emetophiles at some point
Emetophilia is closely related to emetophobia, the fear of vomiting, since some people have developed emetophilia as a result of emetophobia and many emetophiles, ironically, continue to fear vomiting themselves despite the amount of time they spend fantasizing about other people vomiting.
Emetophiles are most interested in the vomiting of people they are interested in sexually. (e.g., heterosexual men seek to learn about the vomiting of heterosexual women, etc.) Fantasizing about celebrities vomiting is commonplace, and is perhaps fueled by the bumper crop of vomit scenes in the movies and on TV in recent years.
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.
~ knuth/taocp.html ~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz
Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
That's hardly Knu. Haha, really, I had a link to it going back at least two years... can I find it? Nope, I got rid of it it was so old.
The next volume will be:
"The Art of Being Slashdotted"
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).
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Nifty, but mainly from the whole CS angle. And it seems a bit more approachable that the third book was, although some of that has to do with the fact that I was relatively unschooled when I first read them.
It'll be a pleasure to add it to my bookshelf.
You can't defeat physics.
fp ?
How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf? For my money, Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest's "Introduction to Algorithms" is preferred for almost all related material you might want to investigate.
I'm still waiting.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I love bookpool but this mailing was premature and a waste of my time. Unfortunately since they've now been /.ed I can't get to their site to unsubscribe ;)
"Theory of the Brontosaurus"?
Check the left column of http://www.bookpool.com/.x/SSSSSS_C473S597521D0502 011740/ct/163. You can buy parts of Vol. 1 (revised) and 4 already, in addition to the one part that's ready for free download.
They also say they expect to be able to sell you the entire volume 4 in 2007. And I'll bet Knuth doesn't slip nearly as bad as Longhorn.
Sigs? Sigs? We don't need no steenkin' sigs.
Hopefully he finishes it before he finishes living.
All the best to the man, but seriously, dude, get on the ball. You don't have that many years left. If you can distill what's in your brain into book form, you will have done all of us a huge service.
Knuth made a suggestion that he would have vol 4 published in 2007. I wouldn't doubt his estimation if he wrote down a deadline for himself, and everyone else.
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
Donald Knuth. Donald F'ing Knuth, geek idol, computer scientist and gift to anagrammatists everywhere. Yet another of the secular saints of the Eric Raymond crowd, and writer of TeX and Metafont, the typesetting and font design programs which lie behind half the computer books in existence (specifically, the poorly typeset half in the ugly fonts). Writer of the as yet unfinished meisterwerk of algorithm design, "The Art of Computer Programming". The avuncular figure who gave many of today's prominent "hackers" their big break. An example to us all.
Hooey. While some might think it a little poor for us to be picking on a man in the autumn of his years who has done little actual direct physical harm to others, the raison d'etre of adequacy.org is to puncture overinflated reputations, and Knuth's is one of the windiest. Every single plank of his rickety edifice seems to be based on the massive intellectual inferiority complex of the geek nation; their belief that because they don't understand something, it must be difficult. Put it this way; in our opinion, the main reason that the Art of Computer Programming remains unfinished is that when the truth gets out about Knuth, the fact that he hasn't finished his book is the only reason anyone will want to recusitate him.
TeX and Metafont
According to the Jargon File, "Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years."
I'm sorry. Readers who are sane, or who have sane acquaintances, or who are not familiar with the wilder shores of computer programmers and their personality diseases, may not quite have taken in that last passage. For their benefit, I'll repeat it, in bold, and with a hyperlink to the source so that they can independently verify that I didn't make it up to slander Knuth.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I-III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years.
So in other words, Knuth is the kind of guy who would rather spend eight years locked away in a stinky computer lab, than pick up the phone once to complain to his typesetters and tell them to do it properly. Rather than trouble himself with five minutes of human interaction, he spent eight years snivelling over a keyboard. That's the calibre of individual we're dealing with here.
It completely beggars belief. For reference, here's how I would address this problem; brrring brrring, hello, typesetting department, jsm here, could you sort out the typesetting in my book please it's a disgrace, certainly sir, goodbye. Total time taken, five minutes max. By my calculations, this method is approximately 2,522,880 times more efficient than Knuth's. I say "approximately" because I didn't allow for leap years. I didn't allow for leap years because it's completely unimportant and a purely illustrative statistic in any case. That's an example of a "proportionate amount of effort", by the way; spending eight years correcting a typing error isn't. Not that you can do something so simple as correct a typing error in TeX without first committing an 800 page manual to memory. It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem every time they need to change their line spacing, but how
After Vol. 4 are you going to do some "prequels?" So 1-4 are actually, say, 3-6, and then the new Vols. 1 and 2 include new special effects capable only in LaTeX2e?
Letter
I bet this book was written with MS Word!
Hey SLASHDOT,
I like the new Look!!!!!!!!!!!
How many people have bought the entire Knuth series just to occupy the moral high ground on their bookshelf?
That's absolute nonsense. I often will take one of his volumes off the bookshelf, put La Boheme on the stereo (the Pappano recording, of course) , pour myself a glass of Le Montrachet '78, and peruse Prof. Bluth's delightful words. You shouldn't be bitter just because you're too uncouth to understand them.
Or does slashdot look like shit?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I have this on my NT4 box.
x ec/obidos/ASIN/0201038 048/o/qid=910738318/sr=2-1/002-8742586-1066816
2 01 038048
1999-05-28 13:58 116 Amazon.com_ A Glance_ Art of Computer Programming.url
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.amazon.com/e
According to this, it's already released (Apr 2004):
http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/compare/isbn/0
No, I'm New Here
I'm off to ask Addison-Wesley for a review copy of volume 4!
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Is this the same Knuth that wrote along with Morris and Pratt the famous string matching algorithm?
Secrets out. The book are so slow because of Don's Star Wars commitments:
Uncanny!
Man. At this rate, he's never going to get to the Dark Tower.
Actually, my review of the Bible (well, one edition of it, anyway) is here.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
+2 insightful? what about -1 obvious?
Algorithms in C, volumes 1 through 5. Absolutely the best comp sci book out there. One page of Knuth makes me sleepy. Sedgewick reads like a good detective story - you can't put it down.
The same story also claimed that Professor Knuth was also a contributor of some note to Mad Magazine.
use Lyx, very good quality output - as printout, PDF or HTML and easier to use than MS Word.
However I agree with you in that I'd prefer Dr Knuth to proceed with the completion of his book series in a breadth-first fashion rather than depth-first (i.e., dropping the habit to take a few years off to revise all existing volumes every couple of years). This would even able other people to assist him in refining the set and filling in the gaps; maybe he could even set up a wiki for the non-existing volumes to gather material in a more "open source" way.
But then who am I to tell the Aristotle of computer science what to do...
Knuth isn't God.
Correct, so far...
His books aren't the Bible.
Wrong!
Actually I think that I heard that his motivation for MetaFont (not TeX) was proper typesetting of the Bible, the link above might put you on a trail.
Paul B.
... posthumously.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Knuth is okay. But I prefer google. More pages.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
The Atrocity Archives is a way cool book, I heartily recommend it to /. geeks. Stross used to work as a programmer/sysadmin so it's a lot of fun if you've ever worked in IT.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
For many years, I wondered which volume 4 would win the race; this one or Star Wars. Too bad the wrong one won!
Without Knuth there would be no Google. 'nuff said.
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
like, for example, page numbering starting on a number other than 1 I didn't know how to do that. I googled for it. No nine megabytes of C code involved. And a real troll would have seized on TeX being written in WEB, the Pascal-like "literate programming" language that Knuth designed himself. A real troll would have further complained that most hacking is really done using TeX's own macro system, which can be weird and baroque a lot of the time.
And how did "Knuth" become "Bluth" halfway through? If it's a joke about the Mormon animator, follow it through.
And dear god, man, there may be better ways of separating content and presentation---standards-compliant HTML with CSS, anyone?---but MS Word is not it. I've seen documents that have gone through many hands, serious works that involve difficult formatting... and it ain't pretty. Word is simply not a serious typesetting tool. Talk about InDesign or QuarkXPress if you want to go on about that.
LaTeX also allows the use of standard PostScript fonts with a quickin the preamble, but I kinda like the cm fonts myself.
Also, I'm not sure where the complaints about needing to edit incomprehensible jargon to correct typos came from. Text is represented as... plain old text. When is it any other way? Math is hard to read if it's badly written or you're not used to it, but it's no worse than it has to be, to my eyes.
Is it a sign of the incredible good design of TeX that the Adequacy people couldn't find very many real flaws to harp on? Or does Adequacy simply suck ass? I fear it to be the latter; I have plenty of nits to pick with TeX, but this reads like it was written by someone who heard of TeX once, and decided to write a rant about it. Frickin' weak.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I hear it will be bundled with a copy of Longhorn and a copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Quicksort shoots first.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Comparing TeX to PS or PDF doesn't really make sense. PostScript and PDF are output languages, while TeX is a typesetting program. It's like comparing the merits of Photoshop versus JPEG.
I don't think anyone really writes PS directly, unless they're l33t hackers. (There is that tiny snowflake program that prints a different snowflake every time. That's pretty darn nifty.
But little to do with typesetting. You'd want to compare TeX to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, I suppose. Comparing it to MS Word is a frickin' joke.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"It's a pleasure to meet you, Professor Knuth," Steve said. "I've read all of your books."
"You're full of shit," Knuth responded.
From folklore.org
Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on Computer Science was the greatest.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."
I suppose the poster was trying to make a joke. Anyone knows he Knuth is the author of TeX.
I had the opportunity to see Prof. Knuth lecture this wednesday, and in the lecture he made the exact same joke (comparing TAOCP to star wars prequels).
He also mentioned the fasciscle and pre-fascicle publication of vol 4, stating that the first fascicle should be out within a month. He further said that the publishing company had pledged to make the fascicles inexpensive, which would probably mean a self-destructing binding set to fall apart when the full volume comes out.
Oh, and the lecture was on discrete math, or possibly on the relationship between the mathematical model of physics and discrete math... the relationship between "topplings" of the grain of sand model and numbers of spanning trees in a graph.
Here's a photo of the cover.
while Dijkstra was still trying to find the shortest path to the conference
According to the story MAD published Knuths "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" in 1957. In the article the basic unit of force was named "whatmeworry" and the fundamental unit of length was defined as the thickness of MAD magazine #26. These scientific breakthroughs are now known as the first publication of Professor Knuth - he must be proud.
Didn't he publish "The Art of Computer Programming" in 1968, when he was still at Caltech (according to the preface to the first edition, which was written from Pasadena, California) , just before he arrived at Stanford?
...TeX.
Over thirty years later after finishing the third volume, he's almost finished with its successor. That's way too long, pretty inexecusable, and bordering on the laughable.
The greatest computer scientist in the world created, in the intervening years from third volume to retirement, the
A typesetting language.
Not HTML.
Not the World Wide Web.
Not the Internet.
A typesetting language so that nerdy graduate students could have an excuse for not socializing or doing original work while they fiddled around for hours using TeX to pretty-print their papers. After all, they are "working on the computer", aren't they?
Is this what Arthur C. Clarke thought we'd be doing in the year 2001? I don't seem to remember that "Dave" was conversing with the computer HAL via TeX formatted files. HAL was able to comprehend people just by READING THEIR LIPS, for crying out loud.
By contrast, consider a 27 page Ph.D. thesis written by a guy named John Forbes Nash back in 1950 at Princeton University. With no TeX in those days, the double-spaced typewritten thesis has hand-written mathematical formulae and Greek symbols scribbled among and in between the lines. That thesis would win Nash the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. If I recall correctly, you can see an actual-sized reproduction of the entire thesis, complete with hand-written scribbles, in the book The Essential John Nash . (Somehow, the hand-written stuff makes you feel as if Nash is sitting in the room with you, and -- corny as it sounds -- closer to his genius, as if you peeked inside his diary or something. )
You don't need TeX to be successful; you just have to have good ideas, and you need to be spending time developing those good ideas rather than iteratively kerning your fonts.
Just what did Knuth do?
http://www.epinions.com/content_73675148932
Yes, apparently he was told just to go to the conference, but he considered that advice harmful.
Computer programming is not an art, it is a craft.
I hear they're bundling Duke Nukem Forever with Knuth's ACP vol. 4. Might just be a rumor, though ...
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
Yes, that offer still stands. Apparently, he has solved the micropayment problem.
It is good to see that people here have a good sense of humor.
It's Xyvision
Bad choosing of words for that joke.
God, or Linus wouldn't have called "Linux" an OS.
God, because if he existed, he would know what a kernel is, and what an OS is.
Linus, out of fear of death by the hands of RMS, yelling: "the OS is GNU/Linux, Linux is just a kernel!!!".
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Actually, the use of standard PostScript fonts probably would've been:
\usepackage{pslatex}
That said, \usepackage{times} is obsolete (see the PSNFSS docs), instead use:
\usepackage{mathptmx}
If instead you want Palatino (well, URW's knock-off):
\usepackage{mathpazo}
Other font-oriented packages to try:
- helvet
- avant
- courier
- chancery
- bookman
- newcent
- utopia
- charter
as well as packages for Euler, and to match Utopia, use the fourier package to get matching math fonts.
and those are just the freely available options. Lots more if one wants to purchas font sets.
See http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for a sample of what can be done with TeX / LaTeX / ConTeXt &c.
another pretty cool example is up at:
http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/
William
(ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in the above, http://members.aol.com/willadams )
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
So where are your scientific breakthroughs? Jackass.
Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"
Torvalds: "Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"
Knuth: "Wait, wait - I never said that."
Stallman would undoubtedly participate in a conversation like that.
Don't know about Linus's thoughts on the matter.
I should imagine, however, that Knuth would never be caught dead uttering such a thing:
I used to work for bookpool (4 or so months ago). They're a great group of people dedicated to serving the customer. Little known fact: They are on the Island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts!
Their prices are usually the best around, and they ship things out quick. So after the slashdotting, be sure to check them out for tech books.
I'm curious... how many people had heard of them before today?
If it's on your bookshelf, people may be impressed when they see it.
You'll score with the ladies for sure!
I'm hoping to get a leather bound set when it's all done for my bookshelf. I hope they publish it that way, and I hope he completes it some day. It'll be a classic technical work for hundreds (thousands?) of years.
I'll give a shameless plug here. I have a transcript of TeX in C on the Centrinia project design branch. This transcript passed the TRIP test. If anyone wants to look at it, the tarball is avaliable at my web site above. The directory is centrinia/design/base/typesetting/TeX6/. Remember, it is still in design and will not be available in the Centrinia library proper for a while.
One of the goals for the transcription is to reimplement the memory system. Another goal is to allow for Unicode. The other and broader goals are to speed up the TeX file compilation process and to generalize anything that I can. I serously doubt that it would be possible to write a specification for the TeX language but if I have the time, resources, and the labor, I would get somene to rewrite the entire TeX system based on defining specifications isomorphic to the WEB file definitions (even though the definitions are not very definite).
In summary, an unstable open source TeX engine written in C that passed the TRIP test is available.
My copy has a personal meaning to me. It belonged to my most-hated-- and most brilliant and insightful-- Comp. Sci. professor, Dr. Lee Hill. I learned /so/ many from him. When he retired, he left his books up for grabs.
/lot/ of value, which many programmers (sorry, but usually those without a degree) are too quick deride, in learning these things. To "bash" either work is merely to label oneself a peculiar breed of misanthrope.
/. regularly. :)
In a professional sense, I have had occasion to use Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms" directly for more than one project. I think it is a magnificent tome, and one very well suited for the more erudite craftsman, rather than the world-class expert (Knuth's audience). It's cleverly constructed-- the authors want you to learn the principles, not necessarily the best applications. There's a
In the end, everything for both the workman and the academic alike comes to Knuth's vast an incredible survey of Computer Science, no matter how you slice it. It is very, very hard going to make it through any moment of these, but well worth each struggle and every step. The Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest/Stein book would likely never have existed without this immense undertaking having begun.
Donald E. Knuth has made (ignoring even, things like the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm and his wonderful book, "Surreal Numbers") so many contributions to our field that the naieve attempt of the topic to deride them, or those lucky enough to own even a single volume of "The Art of Computer Programming" (Bach reference, anybody? DK plays the organ, after all...), are absolutely asinine-- and one reason that for my money I really don't have time to post on
Now, if you will pardon me... there's code to write.
:::sigh:::
I guess us poor chumps who write raw PCL are all but forgotten.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Shouldn't that be "'knuff said."?
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
It's good to hear that he's moving back to theoretical work after his most recent book.
The story is true, Knuth lists it in his vita. I have also heard that "Art" is a reference to a computer scientist named Art, but could never remember where I heard this from.
The first lesson to learn from a Real Programmer, such as Knuth:
It will ship when it's done.
Bookpool has an exclusive excerpt of the book that is going to stand on the shelfs of many /. reader.
42 + 1 = 42
Isn't PCL a yecchy-looking binary language? I remember seeing some raw PCL output and thinking that it looked like line noise. I've seen raw PostScript, which at least one can lex with the naked eye, if not parse.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca