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Donald Knuth Turns 80, Seeks Problem-Solvers For TAOCP (stanford.edu)
An anonymous reader writes:
When 24-year-old Donald Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming, he had no idea that he'd still be working on it 56 years later. This month he also celebrated his 80th birthday in Sweden with the world premier of Knuth's Fantasia Apocalyptica, a multimedia work for pipe organ and video based on the bible's Book of Revelations, which Knuth describes as "50 years in the making."
But Knuth also points to the recent publication of "one of the most important sections of The Art of Computer Programming" in preliminary paperback form: Volume 4, Fascicle 6: Satisfiability. ("Given a Boolean function, can its variables be set to at least one pattern of 0s and 1 that will make the function true?")
Here's an excerpt from its back cover: Revolutionary methods for solving such problems emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and they've led to game-changing applications in industry. These so-called "SAT solvers" can now routinely find solutions to practical problems that involve millions of variables and were thought until very recently to be hopelessly difficult.
"in several noteworthy cases, nobody has yet pointed out any errors..." Knuth writes on his site, adding "I fear that the most probable hypothesis is that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to check these things out carefully as yet." He's uncomfortable printing a hardcover edition that hasn't been fully vetted, and "I would like to enter here a plea for some readers to tell me explicitly, 'Dear Don, I have read exercise N and its answer very carefully, and I believe that it is 100% correct,'" where N is one of the exercises listed on his web site.
Elsewhere he writes that two "pre-fascicles" -- 5a and 5B -- are also available for alpha-testing. "I've put them online primarily so that experts in the field can check the contents before I inflict them on a wider audience. But if you want to help debug them, please go right ahead."
But Knuth also points to the recent publication of "one of the most important sections of The Art of Computer Programming" in preliminary paperback form: Volume 4, Fascicle 6: Satisfiability. ("Given a Boolean function, can its variables be set to at least one pattern of 0s and 1 that will make the function true?")
Here's an excerpt from its back cover: Revolutionary methods for solving such problems emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and they've led to game-changing applications in industry. These so-called "SAT solvers" can now routinely find solutions to practical problems that involve millions of variables and were thought until very recently to be hopelessly difficult.
"in several noteworthy cases, nobody has yet pointed out any errors..." Knuth writes on his site, adding "I fear that the most probable hypothesis is that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to check these things out carefully as yet." He's uncomfortable printing a hardcover edition that hasn't been fully vetted, and "I would like to enter here a plea for some readers to tell me explicitly, 'Dear Don, I have read exercise N and its answer very carefully, and I believe that it is 100% correct,'" where N is one of the exercises listed on his web site.
Elsewhere he writes that two "pre-fascicles" -- 5a and 5B -- are also available for alpha-testing. "I've put them online primarily so that experts in the field can check the contents before I inflict them on a wider audience. But if you want to help debug them, please go right ahead."
Didn't he just get arrested for buying an iPhone X?!
Will he be covering the numerous algorithmic and data structure discoveries made by the Rust programming language's creators? For example they have discovered new algorithms for tracking ownership of resources. Knuth's work couldn't be considered anywhere near comprehensive as long as it is missing coverage of what the Rust programming language has given us.
One of my favorite XKCD strips is Knuth-related: https://xkcd.com/163/
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
'nuff said.
Have you ever read any of TAOCP? Years ago I kept hearing how great it supposedly is, so I read all of the volumes that were available at that time. I have to say, I was very underwhelmed. It wasn't a bad work, but I don't think it was deserving of the praise that's heaped on it so often. I've since found that Wikipedia articles are often more comprehensive, more comprehensible, have better examples, and are more practical.
This is akin to someone saying "I don't know why everyone says Shakespeare is so great. His writing is just a bunch of famous quotations strung together."
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Because it's theory, and far too few programmers bother with that. They're more interested in tying frameworks together with programming glue. And yes, it's a difficult book to read; it requires thinking and practice and is the opposite of "Learn a Popular Language in 21 days".
Some rando? omfg.
I would love to see a short story written by him about the connections between pipe organs and computers. Until the invention of the steam locomotive, organs were the most complex devices ever made. Many of the terms of CPU/ALU parts came from the pipe organ such as register, buffer and accumulator. There is a reference in one of his books that he was going to use the royalties from TAOCP to buy an organ.
Heard the preview. I've heard worse, but that isn't saying much. Competently written, more than competently performed. Inspired? No. Cohesive? No. As tidily organized and precise in detail as any technical text he has published. Worth sitting through? Don't entirely know yet because the composition is not released, but at this point it seems safe to say, that would be more out of respect for the person who wrote it than the enjoyment of a masterpiece. On other fronts, I will be more than happy to attempt to wade through as much of the new AOCP as I can possibly manage, when available. I hope it does become available, at least, more so than the 6th volume of Ice and Fire.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It's not just that it's theory, it's theory presented in a pretty unapproachable way. People read TAOCP for the same reason that they join Mensa: so that they can look down on people that didn't. If you actually want to learn the theory, then you can pick up pretty much any undergraduate computer science textbook and see a far more approachable presentation.
Remember, this is the same Knuth whose TeX system started with a Turing machine and thought 'that's a really approachable programming model. Scoping and constraining side effects are for n00bs'.
If you feel the need to read something written by one of the computer science greats, then read pretty much anything Dijkstra wrote (even his review of the IBM 1620).
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