Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
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Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#2I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certainly not the only person with that opinion.
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#3I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certainly not the only person with that opinion.
You'll definitely enjoy this: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf
Edit: sorry, misread your comment, thought you were wondering what was Knuth's opinion. Still, I'll leave the link here, since it's a great read nonetheless
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#4I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certainly not the only person with that opinion.
You'll definitely enjoy this: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf Edit: sorry, misread your comment, thought you were wondering what was Knuth's opinion. Still, I'll leave the link here, since it's a great read nonetheless
For the lazy people, from that document:
> Donald Knuth: (Retired from Stanford) It will be solved by either 2048 or 4096. I am currently somewhat pessimistic. The outcome will be the truly worst case scenario: namely that someone will prove “P=NP because there are only finitely many obstructions to the opposite hypothesis”; hence there will exists a polynomial time solution to SAT but we will never know its complexity!
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#5I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certainly not the only person with that opinion.
I think he just got tired of being asked the question and decided to start messing around.
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#6I am certainly never one to question Donald Knuth on things in computer science, but I've always thought his opinion of P vs. NP an odd one, though he is certainly not the only person with that opinion.
I think he just got tired of being asked the question and decided to start messing around.
His reasoning felt solid to me. Even if it turns out to be true it is unlikely to be useful, which is borne out by the lack of algorithms and research that have come close to cracking it, despite the effort of many.
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#7Anyone here who can honestly say that they worked through all volumes (obviously not answering everything)? I often hear people talk about it but never met anyone in real life who actually did this.
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#8[deleted]
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#9Interesting demarcation he makes between geeks and mathematicians and scientific thinkers more generally. Would be curious what the identifying traits of geeks are in his mind, though one can make some guesses given the examples he cites.
Re: Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014)
#10Anyone here who can honestly say that they worked through all volumes (obviously not answering everything)? I often hear people talk about it but never met anyone in real life who actually did this.
I read the pseudo random number generation very carefully and skimmed around the rest. But reading everything...