11–20 of 61 posts
Awesome Read. Picking out a line: "For simplicity, let me say that people like me are "geeks," and that geeks comprise about 2% of the world's population."
"So who were the geeks of the early 19th century?" This question made me pause and ask another question: Who are the geeks of the early 21st century, specifically, 2014? I fear in my heart that software development is becoming less and less of a "geek" hideout over time. I did, however, go to Maker Faire last weekend. It was a geek wonderland. There were so many cool projects on display and a huge emphasis on getting…
His reply was yes, but not many. He mentioned a guy in Germany who goes over his books again and again looking for errors. This guy is the leading recipient of Knuth's checks.
That was the question I'd wanted to ask Knuth for several years. It was a good question for a thirty second interaction and photo.
Knuths response to Tarjans Q15 was particularly interesting since he was able to illustrate his insight with a concrete example;
>Thus I think the present state of research in algorithm design misunderstands the true nature of efficiency. The literature exhibits a dangerous trend in contemporary views of what deserves to be published.
> Another issue, when we come down to earth, is the efficiency of algorithms on real computers. As part of the Stanford GraphBase project I implemented four algorithms to compute minimum spanning trees of graphs, one of which was the very pretty method that you developed with Cheriton and Karp. Although I was expecting your method to be the winner, because it examines much of the data only half as often as the others, it actually came out two to three times worse than Kruskal's venerable method. Part of the reason was poor cache interaction, but the main cause was a large constant factor hidden by O notation.
(edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.)
(brag: I got a decimal dollar by check from Professor Knuth for finding a typo in 2010. Nothing clever, just a cheap typo, but I was happy.)
In the Q&A Knuth mentions TAOCP conversion to ebook several times - I did a quick search and found only millions of pirate sites. Does anyone know the legitimate source where the ebook can be bought? Informit seemed likely but there are only two digital volumes available there. (edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.) (brag: I got a deci…
In the Q&A Knuth mentions TAOCP conversion to ebook several times - I did a quick search and found only millions of pirate sites. Does anyone know the legitimate source where the ebook can be bought? Informit seemed likely but there are only two digital volumes available there. (edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.) (brag: I got a deci…
In the Q&A Knuth mentions TAOCP conversion to ebook several times - I did a quick search and found only millions of pirate sites. Does anyone know the legitimate source where the ebook can be bought? Informit seemed likely but there are only two digital volumes available there. (edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.) (brag: I got a deci…
Way cool on the brag. I thought he stopped with the checks.
The reason for the change: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html
In the Q&A Knuth mentions TAOCP conversion to ebook several times - I did a quick search and found only millions of pirate sites. Does anyone know the legitimate source where the ebook can be bought? Informit seemed likely but there are only two digital volumes available there. (edit: there is a note saying "as they become available". I guess TAOCP is only partially portable so far, more to come.) (brag: I got a deci…
"I did write a compiler manual in 1958, which by chance was actually used as the textbook for one of my classes in 1959(!)" How many people in the world could claim something similar?