111–120 of 141 posts
it's worth reading just for one of the best book in-jokes ever - see the introductory part "Notes on the Exercises" of Volume 2 "Seminumerical Algorithms" 3. [M50] Prove that when n is an integer, n > 2, the equation xn + yn = zn has no solution in positive integers x, y, z. Knuth's book was published in 1973. The initial solution to this exercise was solved by a then Princeton professor in 1993 and was finalized by…
It's kinda important to note here that the "M50" designation indicates that the excercise is an "unsolved research problem". It's not an in-joke; Knuth is presenting unsolved problems with the intention that the student would consider trying solving them.
Knuth himself found it funny [6]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-joke
[2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.compute...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/38gt65/was...
[4] http://texthook.com/blog/2013/07/01/reading-knuth/
[5] http://tal.forum2.org/story_45
[6] http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb17-1/tb50knut.pdf (page 10)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "but even just looking at actual computer science stuff, the field is expanding rapidly." Is it though? Hash tables - 1953, Red-Black trees 1972, Quicksort 1959, etc...
Look at Knuth's future book plans, and consider all the things he's not putting in them that are current. He's also revisited the books some, and plans to do so again in the future. I don't mean to take away from the books - they're beautiful and full of a lot of timeless knowledge. There's just something that seems a bit ... I can't even find a word for it ... about the endeavor.
In a sense it's all irrelevant today. How many of your colleagues mentioned O() in any of the past five standups? Add a load balancer and scale up by adding instances, that's today. Don't even profile, much less understand.
However, if you're the kind of person who thinks hard about abstract matters and would like to encourage that side of yourself, then you might want to read that. You'll probably find it hard, particularly if you're a "ruby programmer" or "java programmer" rather than a "programmer", because Knuth is rather the opposite.
Interestingly, I have found that some parts of the book offer much more useful information than others. All offer the same thorough, intellectual approach, but while much of what volumes 1/3 say is useful for a modern programmer (but not for a modern programmer), what I learned in volume 2 hasn't been of much use to me. Today's languages and libraries offer both math and data structures. But in practice, for whatever reasons, they seem to have liberated me effectively from caring about seminumerical algorithms, while I still think about data structures every week.
Knuth writes about making things fast with drum memory. I don't have drum memory, but making my data structures fast within the real-world constraints remains a topic, and somehow it's the same topic. Knuth also writes forty pages about floating point, but when I use floating point I don't worry about that part in the same way. The libraries do what I need and their internal problems rarely or never leak up to me. (Well, at work we do occasionally share "14.000000000002%" of revenue... but it's not a problem. Insignificant.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did you find laugh out loud funny in Finnegans Wake? (A serious question, I'm not trying to be argumentative.) To me, there were lots of things that were clever or slightly amusing, but nothing near hilarious. Some examples from the first chapter "oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods" - ok, that's clever turning Ostrogoths and Visigoths into seafood gods. The Willingdone Museyroom section was entertaining enough with "W…
"Shem was a sham and a low sham and his lowness creeped out first via foodstuffs. So low was he that he preferred Gibsen's tea-time salmon tinned, as inexpensive as pleasing, to the plumpest roeheavy lax or the friskiest parr or smolt troutlet that ever was gaffed between Leixlip and Island Bridge and many was the time he repeated in his botulism that no junglegrown pineapple ever smacked like the whoppers you shook…
There is this Hindu[1] tale[2] that goes like this: A king once solicited a scholar to read an ancient hindu text, so that the king may better understand God. The scholar goes away, and after a period of time comes to the king. The king asks "Have you read the text?" to which the scholar replies "Yes I have." The king does not believe the scholar and sends the scholar to read the text. Some time passes by, and the sc…
>>was it worth it? You are not supposed to read about any algorithm. There is nothing special about knowing how some sorting algorithm works, or any algorithm for that matter. That knowledge is no better than knowing how some war in history happened. Or remembering arcane trivial about things. Knowing how to sort a list a dozen ways, no big deal. Unless you discovered the algorithms yourself, there is nothing special…
However, a large category of real world problems is solvable only through a combination of solutions to hard problems.
If I have to solve three hard problems before I can have a complete solution is at hand - and by hard I mean months of work - my memory is so poor that the current value of a solved problem does not depend on whether I or someone elso solved it. I've forgotten the details anyway - and the only thing I have are the implementation and documentation.
I have a limited lifespan but the number of interesting problems is infinite.
I can't really find a calculus that says it's far more valuable to solve the known problems several times rather than new interesting problems.
Because that's what you are implying (with my memory) - if never using existing solutions is preferable I would never get anything done.
The same applies for most of civilizations activities.
Don't confuse practicality as the opposite of love of knowledge.
TAOCP creates challenges for many readers, because it does address most problems with an enormous amount of depth and breadth (but at the same time, offers a pretty exhaustive treatment of many topics) and requires a level of mathematics that may be daunting for beginners.
If you want a more accessible text in the same vein, you may want to give Mehlhorn's and Sanders' "Algorithms and Data Structures: The Basic Toolbox" a whirl, as it is freely available online [1]. It is a text aimed specifically at undergraduates and isn't as ambitious as TAOCP, but it still is something that may require a fair amount of effort to follow.
[1] https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~mehlhorn/ftp/Mehlhorn-Sanders...