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Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday

Posted by kdawson on from the perhaps-metafont-ported-to dept.

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.

3 of 701 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That he is... by jordan_robot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That he is a computer simulation fooling all of us for over 50 years...

    I think you mean that we're all a computer simulation he has been running for over 50 years...

  2. Re:I don't think proving P!=NP is earthshaking by mark-t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A proof that P=NP would have much more potential to genuine change things simply because it would disprove a ubiquitous assumption: that P NP. Historically, when universally popular assumptions have been proven wrong, the resulting paradigm shift in the way people think about the matter produces some fascinating changes. P!=NP would give closure to an open problem but would not be so earth-changing because we already operate under the assumption that the premise is true.

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  3. or just by Kohath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    drink a beer, relax, and wait until tomorrow for the announcement. Which is sure to be disappointing now.

    I predict he announces that computer programming is best practiced as a semi-automated assembly-line-style set of interchangeable tasks rather than an "art". He'll say that programming as an "art" is anachronistic. inefficient, and impractical, and that the conventional approach and the people who promote it have been holding back progress in software creation because a faster, cheaper, more modern, dumbed-down approach doesn't appeal to them professionally or aesthetically.

    And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.

    That's my prediction.