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

Re:That he is...

[jordan_robot]

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...

Re:I don't think proving P!=NP is earthshaking

[mark-t]

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.