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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.
Who is Knuth?
He's discovered Wu Tang and Shaolin are one and the same.
Probably that Duke Nukem Forever won't be running any dedicated servers...
Probably meant to link here.
Step #2: Solve for N:
So P!=NP,
therefore P!/P=N,
thus the Ps cancel and we are left with N=!.
Step #3: ???
Step #4: Profit!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
TeX has been adopted by W3 as the new HTML 6 standard.
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?
TeX 3.15 will get released. Subsequently, the universe will collapse.
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.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
... Knuth migrated to Word 2010.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
I speculate it'll be something as earth shattering as the "it" announcement was, or how every person has a Segway in their home now.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
He has a deal with the mysterious British agency known as the Laundry. He doesn't publish the fourth volume and they don't render him metabolically inactive. Don't any of you pay attention to what Charlie Stross has to say?
Einsteins miracle year was when he was 22.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
so ... you're saying Knuth finished calculating every digit of Pi?
...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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
That he is a computer simulation fooling all of us for over 50 years...
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
TeX to ship with iPhone.
TeX version 4.0 .
The genius of it is thinking up something fantastic in your 20s, and savoring the idea for 50 years and announcing it as an older man. Damn, I wish I'd saves some of my best thinking for a rainy day.
Nullius in verba
Acting as an advocate for these people with your spelling, grammar and punctuation skills takes irony to epic levels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie
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.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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'
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.
If the boobs didn't do it, a mathematical proof won't either. :P
I get the sense that this is a tongue-in-cheek announcement? It's 2010, so maybe it'll be the MMX machine?
Let's see. Wednesday: July 7, 2010 = 7-7-7DA. 20th anniversary of TeX. Hmm. I can't figure it out, but I'd put my money on an elegant technical curiosity which doubles as elaborate pun and extended joke, kind of like MMIX.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
He's obviously figured out an algorithm to predict earthquakes, and he's determined that one will happen during or just after his presentation! And, of course, he'll announce it.
You need to think more literally!
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists
(disclaimer: i knew who Knuth was but i'm just not bothered by those that don't when there are so many prominent computer scientists)
My name is Donald Knuth. And if you study with my 8 week program, you will learn a system of self defense that I developed over two seasons of fighting in the octagon! Its called Don Kwan Do!
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.
He proves P != NP.
Due to limitations with TeX can't be bothered to fit it into the margins
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
"Amazing" Randi helped him find out.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
A new edition of TAoCP will be announced, with all code snippets rewritten in JavaScript.
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?
Score:-1, Funny
http://www.codethinked.com/image.axd?picture=WindowsLiveWriter/TheProgrammerDressCode_10D17/knuth_don_2f874343-5a7b-4b33-823a-b18a84849447.jpg
Now compare him with everyone else - they've all got face hair: ...),
Alan Kay (oop),
Bjarne Stroustrup (c++),
Brian Kernighan (unix, c), Dennis Ritchie (c),
Ken Thompson (unix),
John McCarthy (lisp),
Richard Stallman (gnu),
Steve Wozniak (apple),
Larry Wall (perl),
Alan Cox (linux kernel),
James Gosling (java),
Grady Booch (uml),
"Maddog" Jon Hall (linux intl),
Manuel Blum (cryptography),
Robin Milner (ml),
Philip Wadler (haskell, xquery),
Jaron Lanier (virtual reality),
Niklaus Wirth (Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon),
C.A.R. Hoare (quicksort),
Robert Tarjan (splay trees),
Dan Bricklin (visicalc),
Phil Katz (pkzip),
Jon Postel (rfc),
Larry Ellson (oracle).
http://www.codethinked.com/post/2007/12/06/The-Programmer-Dress-Code.aspx Edsger Dijkstra (come on
> 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.
1905 was special rel, Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect. Three papers any one of which was a massive advance: that's why it's referred to as his miracle year.
Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
Well yeah, if those are his peers, he does stand out from the rest of that Wikipedia list. And he definitely belongs on that short list, obviously after Turing and Church - and after Euler, Shannon, Boole, etc - around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.
sic transit gloria mundi
Works on space projects and still designs game engines.
He also married one of the world's most awesome women, Anna Kang. On their honeymoon, she let a pair of computers be set up in the hotel room so that he could program when the mood struck him. No woman I know would allow such a thing to happen.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
There's a conference for TeX? That's an earth shattering thought on its own!
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that one of Einstein's most lasting and relevant contribution to modern Physics is in fact general relativity, in the form of the Einstein field equations. Which he published (correctly) in November 1915, when he was 36.
Here it is
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.
It's Claude, you insensitive claud.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
No, it's a new device called iTeX.
Einstein didn't develop quantum mechanics, he was actually an opponent of it (his famous "god does not play dice" quote is a direct criticism of QM in fact).
It is of course a lot more complicated than that. He objected to some aspects of QM[*], but he also was the one who proposed the very first basics of what was to become QM, and he did quite a lot of work on it.
[*] The philosophical implications of the uncertainty and randomness, especially. He didn't deny the results, but he assumed there was some deterministic layer below it that would someday be discovered.
Given that Knuth doesn't have an email account, I'm betting it's one of these:
- Knuth now has his secretary sending tweets for him.
- Knuth got a Facebook account. It's literally a book of faces.
- Knuth has convinced his secretary to view the most popular YouTube videos on a daily basis, and then act them out. (Her kitten impressions are awesome.)
But seriously, I'm hoping that he's releasing his works under creative commons. Bibles are free in hotels, but if you want the bible of programming and algorithms, you have to pay $70 per volume!
Now I'm working on a IT-department: those type of women would encourage it, but I do not want those women for other reasons.
"His name was James Damore."
one potential worry today tho is the lack of "downtime". That is, there are so many ways for us to not be bored that we basically have no real time to sit down and form grand mental models.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
XeTeX has already been around for a while now and typesets all the Unicode you want painlessly.
He has announced it, and he has paid. Many times. For some reason people rarely cached his checks but stuck them in frames instead. Since pictures of these ended up on the web, Knuth had to stop sending out checks. These days you can get a check from the Bank of San Seriffe instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_wiles
Palm trees and 8
around the same level of recognition as Dijkstra, I would say.
Bah. Knuth wrote volumes of books full of algorithms. I can't think of a single algorithm that Dijkstra ever came up with.
Badass Resumes
Given that Knuth was actually replaced by a self-aware TeX macro some years ago, there is no reason to expect an future productivity decline...
Sums up the whole thread. This is also the main argument against constructivist teaching, on which, for example, the failing modern Spanish education system is built upon.
To do list for Windows
(posting this from the Sir Francis Drake Hotel)
a successor to TeX which he has been working on for some time
scratch tex78 and tex82
so making up for assumptions which don't fit the internet age
jokes about measuring and math in TeX .4pt == .3999pt
maxdimen too small, 1sp too large
tunnel vision caused by computers of the day
subset of XML uses Unicode automatic everything
all directions and all dimensions
hypertext
text audio video sensors GPScoords accelerometers haptics
midi input to score and back to music
no macros --- menu driven like Word but enhanced
spoken command and gestures
\i \TeX (wrapped on a sphere)
spoken name accompanied by (optional) ringing bell
not programmed directly
1289 bugs in TeX
571 bugs in metafont
Project Marianne
www.projectmarianne.com
Project Biturgical
written in Scheme using all buzzwords
pricing - monthly subscription on cloud
first year one month free
pricing based on internet speed
will change everyday
life is too short to reread anything
will benefit world's economy, user's can sell documents
network of certified consultants
online help
- for dummies
- for wizards
- personalized on-line
symbolic equations
graphics
maps
satellite photos
\i\TeX hyper document
math mode like mathml --- must evaluate
avatars
hyperbolic geometry
videoconferencing
world-class photo retouching
character, face, speech recignition
cognition
output format:
- lasercutters
- embroidering machines
- 3D printers
- plasma cutters
interactive cookbook
life as hypertext document
released next month
pending patent applications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Disappointing. I feel manipulated, but at least by someone with obvious high intellect.
According to a participant "Oh, guess he's done. Knuth apparently decided to use TUG 2010 to troll everyone."