Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.

Comments

P!=NP

[afidel]

Would be shocking, but as smart as Knuth is I doubt that's the kind of thing he'd be discovering at this point in his career. Breakthrough proofs tend to be completed by kids in their early to mid 20's, it's when the brain is still plastic enough for truly out of the box thinking but where enough knowledge has been gathered to actually work on the hard problems.

Re:P!=NP

[Jarik C-Bol]

unless of course, your Albert Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, Ernst Ruska, or any number of other important members of the scientific community throughout the centuries. many of these people did not provide 'breakthroughs until well into there 30's, and most of them continued to provide useful advances in science well into there later years.

Re:P!=NP

[afidel]

Einsteins miracle year was when he was 22.

Re:P!=NP

[Darkness404]

...And most people can speak without the aid of a speech synthesizer and can move around that have brilliant minds, yet that doesn't stop Stephen Hawking.

We can make trends all we want but the fact is, every human is different, trends only help somewhat but there are more people who break the trend that do extraordinary work than those who follow it.

Re:P!=NP

[LongearedBat]

Breakthrough proofs tend to be completed by kids in their early to mid 20's, it's when the brain is still plastic enough for truly out of the box thinking but where enough knowledge has been gathered to actually work on the hard problems.

Perhaps also because they actually have the opportunity.

Older people, who may still be plenty capable while having much more experience, seldom have the opportunity (due to mortgage, family, etc.)
Almost all incentives are given to youth (which makes sense). But older people seldom get a break. I think this, more than anything else, is what causes peoples brains to go stale.

Re:P!=NP

[Darkness404]

Also, until recently a lot of them had a lack of continuing education and a lack of fresh ideas. Someone young and looking to get ahead is going to put a lot more time in classes taught by different people and keeping up to date with the trends.

Re:P!=NP

[c0d3g33k]

Acting as an advocate for these people with your spelling, grammar and punctuation skills takes irony to epic levels.

Re:P!=NP

[retchdog]

More to the point, Knuth is foremost an algorithmist. I don't think he cares very much about P $\neq$ NP as an ends in itself since it is probably going to be (and certainly is expected to be) a very abstract math result without much insight into algorithms per se. It's just not his style to spend much energy on it.

Some may laugh at this, but Knuth is a very practically-minded guy who also loves, and is quite capable of, playing with and generalizing these practical ideas and tools into theory. The "serious" attacks on P/NP are just the opposite. I'd guess he's probably taken a few cracks at it for fun and to test out new ideas, but one of them working would really be a longshot. Knuth has a LOT of ideas, but his being the _very first_ one to have the purely algorithmic insight to solve P/NP are quite slim.

Re:P!=NP

[Mathinker]

> but his being the _very first_ one to have the purely algorithmic insight to solve P/NP are quite slim

And the most likely result, in this case, would be that he would prove P = NP (by displaying an polynomial-time algorithm he has discovered for a problem in NP), not P != NP (the proof of which, AFAICS, requires deep mathematical reasoning, not algorithmic prowess).

And, yes, I know that most people believe that P != NP.

Re:P!=NP

[Opportunist]

That's a big gamble in science. Imagine you're prepping something to be unveiled for your 50th birthday, only to hear on your 48th that someone else published it.

Re:P!=NP

[Sique]

That age may well be when he had his insight on the speed of light being constant and time being malleable, though the actual work of course only just started.

The insight that the speed of light is constant is somewhat older and goes back to James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations are based on a constant speed of light. The only thing that was not clear was if the speed of light is also constant under cosmic conditions. The series of Michelson's experiments to find variances in the speed of light started in 1881, and in 1892 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz in collaboration with Henri Poincaré published the Lorentz Ether Theory including the basic mathematics of Special Relativity.

Albert Einstein's genius was thus not to postulate the constant speed of light in vacuum, or the time- and distance contractions resulting from there, but the abolishment of the ether as medium for the light.

Re:P!=NP

[betterunixthanunix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_wiles

It's a TeX conference

[Anonymous Coward]

So it probably TeX related. I don't see Knuth going off topic so much. Of course, the TeX engine is earth in that community, so who knows?

Re:It's a TeX conference

[fendragon]

You mean... someone's found a bug in it?

Re:Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, seriously - I've been working as a software engineer doing R&D work on complicated real time systems for years, and I'd never heard of his name, nor knew of his contribution (that he was responsible for said works) at all until now.

Makes me wonder why anyone would assume everyone on ./ knows who he is, what he's done, or why we should care what he has to announce...

Re:Who?

[c0d3g33k]

Makes me wonder why anyone would assume everyone on ./ knows who he is, what he's done, or why we should care what he has to announce...

Seriously? To draw a comparison, it's like being a geneticist and not knowing who Gregor Mendel is. Or a physicist/mathematician and drawing a blank when Sir Isaac Newton's name comes up. You could be a philosopher who has never heard of Aristotle or Plato. Or a FLOSS developer who has never heard of Richard Stallman. A game developer who has never heard of John Carmack. I could go on, but I'm not sure I could find a good stopping point and I'm fighting the impulse to just be insulting. Your ignorance is appalling. Please just smash your computer with a sledgehammer and go for a long walk on a short pier.

Re:Earthshaking at TUG 2010?

[zill]

I know he's the authority on algorithms but I doubt he can change one of the most fundamental constant in mathematics.

It'll be a update to the Potrzebie System

[qwerty shrdlu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie

Re:Who?

[turing_m]

I talked to a guy in Saint Louis once who was a genetic engineer for Monsanto. He didn't believe in evolution.

Not that surprising. Being capable of sustaining epic levels of cognitive dissonance would be needed to be able to work for Monsanto and sleep at night.

It's highly unlikely to be P!=NP...

[Shaterri]

So far as I know, Knuth has done essentially zero work related to the P/NP question; a lot of algorithmics and tons of fantastic work in combinatorics, but I can't think of a single significant result he's contributed to complexity theory. While it's not impossible that he could have some sort of 'outsider breakthrough', it seems almost infinitesimally unlikely given the mathematical context and techniques that have had to be developed for similar complexity problems. My money would be on either a formal open-sourcing of the TeX codebase or the development of a full HTML5 rendering engine for TeX along the lines of the system that mathoverflow.net uses.

Re:or just

[religious freak]

I appreciate the soothsaying, but I think I speak for most on /. when I say I hope you're wrong!! (even though you are right about (most) software development)

Re:Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people learned how to program outside of academia. I have heard of Knuth, but don't really know anything about him nor do I care to. It hasn't hindered my ability to write software one bit.

Re:I speculate...

[sheriff_p]

Remember when we were all agog about Linus working for some breakthrough company that was going to change everything forever, and in fact, was just TransMeta?

Re:Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it has, actually.

You just aren't equipped to recognize that fact.

Re:Who?

[Toonol]

I learned how to program outside of academia, and have read Knuth. Independent study should still involve some modicum of actual study.

Re:Who?

[terjeber]

You missed the car analogy. It'd be like a car enthusiast who's never heard of Ford. You always have to have a car analogy. It's the law!

Re:I'll bet it's that

[bickerdyke]

What about TeX stopping to use this unreadable syntax and moving to xml?

As much as I like this whole "compile your text to different outputs"-thing and the results of TeX layout, the markup language is a PITA!

Re:Who?

[ldobehardcore]

Seconded. Computer programming is math. Logic is built on the principles of mathematics, (inferring laws from properties and vice-versa, proving what we know, and describing the universe in absolute terms.) and all programs are themselves built on top of logic.

My personal belief is that of many physicists, the entirety of the universe can be reduced to mathematical representation, and we might as well try doing it, if not to further our own understanding, then to at least have some fun along the way.

Re:or just

[ZeroExistenZ]

when I say I hope you're wrong

Miscrosoft has been in the camp to try to simplify programming for years to make it more accessible. They have been failing miserably, getting stuck in often dead ends and each "developer congress" they announce their new approaches, idea's, trends, ... and each year I think "yes, I can see where this need was and why the implemented this approach or feature", yet when you try to use much of it, it's like all other software.

They have been doing this for years, still fail (while making progress) and maybe cashing in on the "education/certification industry" around it (see, people need to know as well how to do all these nifte tricks someone thought up and implemented, and how they were implemented), trickle feeding that as well, ok.

But my point being; Microsoft has a incredible batch of programmers and theorists working for them (you cannot disregard those geeks) and they are focussed on "making development easier" (because it means more tie-in for endusers, right?) but they cannot do it in the way described above, while throwing resources and cash at it pretty high priority.

So will this one guy tackle all those problems piles of bright people have applied themselves to? no.

Re:I speculate...

[SwedishCoward]

No, it's a new device called iTeX.

Re:Who?

[Bromskloss]

I talked to a guy in Saint Louis once who was a genetic engineer for Monsanto. He didn't believe in evolution.

I don't think it's obvious that he would. I'm sure he believes that traits can be inherited and that by selecting who gets to reproduce, you can steer the new generations into having certain qualities, like breeding dogs to have long ears or whatever you fancy. Believing in evolution, on the other hand, would be to hold the position that the current plants and animals are the result of such a process, where the selection has been carried out by naturally occurring circumstances. Embracing evolution implies embracing genetics, but not the other way around.

Re:Who?

[jolyonr]

He's the guy who created 'Dragon's Lair', you idiot!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair

Oh.... wait....

Re:Who?

[mcvos]

It's pathetic that you think nobody else can think for themselves or come up with their own ideas and breakthroughs.

Do you honestly think that you can come up with the kind of breakthroughs that have been done in CS over the past 60 years without reading some of the literature?

Sure, if you write some simple scripts or basic applications, you don't need to know much about algorithms, but once you start messing about with algorithms and datastructures, it pays to at least have heard of Knuth.

Re:Who?

[JambisJubilee]

Wow, what a troll. I guess you're the kind of guy who just "comes up" with 60+ years of rigorous research in computer science. The grandparent is an idiot because of this statement:

I have heard of Knuth, but don't really know anything about him nor do I care to.

You must be the most pretentious asshole programmer in the world. Not only do you think the greatest minds in your discipline have nothing to teach you, but you are actively engaged in trying NOT to learn new things.

Great life you have ahead of you...

Re:TeX

[marcello_dl]

PI is not 3, it is not 3.14, it is not 3.1415..... (for a finite number of digits) either.

But somehow the Bible giving an integer approximation vs. an arbitrary fractional approximation is funny. Among the wealth of issues that can be discussed about the bible with the modern sensibility this seems the less problematic one to me.

Re:I'll bet it's that

[bickerdyke]

I actually like how LaTeX is not WYSIWYG. Concentrating on content and then finally compile it into something ready for a professional Printshop, so I'm nor arguing on that or a general markup system.

It may be a personal thing, but I prefer the clarity of XML. I already gave a few examples of the inconsistencies of TeX markup a few postings down.

<foo> ALWAYS starts a block and </foo> ALWAYS ends one. And there is no other way to start a block, and no such thing as a lone opening tag. (just a way to abbreviate empty blocks)

Special Characters ALWAYS start with & and you know you can read on until the ;

LaTeX has fantastic results, mut the markup has no logic whatsoever!

why is it \begin{document} and \begin{center}, but \section{title} and NOT \begin{section} ? So I not only have to remember the keywords, but also tons of stuff about their usage!

And it is NOT easy to read for humans when half of the quotation marks actually start quotes, but the other half marks umlauts!

Re:TeX

[WillAdams]

No, the Bible says that if one builds a bowl w/ a certain outside diameter and a certain wall thickness, the inside circumference will be such that pi is ~3.14:

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm

Just an ad

[bjs555]

Disappointing. I feel manipulated, but at least by someone with obvious high intellect.