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Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

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Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#41

Post by dhosek »

WillAdams wrote: post #17
zabzonk wrote: post #8

A long while back I wrote an answer on Stack Overflow to a question that asked "How to read TAOCP?" my answer looked something like this: - don't read them - get all the books, put them in a bin bag and shake vigorously with some lumps of coal, to give them that "used" look - go through the books, underline things at random and make notes (also at random) in the margin such as "how true", or even better "wrong!" - pu…

I have worked with two programmers who had well-thumbed copies of TAoCP on their shelves which each had actually read (one was the only other person I've met outside of a TeX conference who had a reward check) --- to this day, I've not worked with better devs.

Ah nothing like a DEK post to pull out the old TeX folks on HN.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#43

Post by wglb »

zabzonk wrote: post #8

A long while back I wrote an answer on Stack Overflow to a question that asked "How to read TAOCP?" my answer looked something like this: - don't read them - get all the books, put them in a bin bag and shake vigorously with some lumps of coal, to give them that "used" look - go through the books, underline things at random and make notes (also at random) in the margin such as "how true", or even better "wrong!" - pu…

When I bought the first volume in about 1969, I vowed to read that one, and then each one that followed.

However, that is yet to come to pass.

However, when we at Mark Williams Company writing the floating point routines for the C compiler (https://winworldpc.com/product/mark-williams-letsc/3x), we were heavily reading Chapter 4, particularly on long division.

Also did spend some time in the Random Number generation chapter.

An interesting difference between my 1965 version and the ones published today is that long multi-page foldout in Sorting and Searching showing tape-based merge sort is no longer part of the book.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#44

Post by rgmerk »

jll29 wrote: post #15

I've emailed DEK to point out that the first person to break Enigma was not actually Alan M. Turing (as stated in one of the recent pre-fascicles) but the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski (Turing's contribution was to automate the task, which was important because the rotors/settings were reconfigured by the German Wehrmacht every morning). Bletchley Park now has a prominent bust of Rejewski that credits his acco…

The book series will never be completed, and wouldn't be if Knuth lives to 120.

And that's perfectly fine.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#46

Post by pests »

jks wrote: post #13
gblargg wrote: post #12

Does the bank really read the amounts as hexadecimal?

He used to send out real cheques for $2.56 but apparently they contained codes that could be used to transfer money out of his account in excess of the sum of the cheque. Now he uses the made-up Bank of San Serriffe, which naturally understands hexadecimal. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html

Routing and account numbers at the bottom of a check are semi-private and nefarious actors can abuse them. See the movie/book Catch Me If You Can about Frank Abigail.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#47

Post by rgovostes »

I haven't read TAOCP myself, but if I recall a lecture that Knuth gave, his algorithm analyses sometimes include cycle counts for his virtual MMIX architecture. He mentioned that these are counted by hand. If I were seeking a reward check, I would write a verifier to look for errors there.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#48

Post by abhgh »

zoky wrote: post #39
svat wrote: post #36

My Knuth checks amount to a total account balance of 0x$b.40 at his "Bank of San Seriffe" (the equivalent of eleven "errors" and two "suggestions") — mostly accumulated over a short period several years ago. Previously, I had the impression that Knuth was some magical figure of perfection. What I realized was that the truth was more surprising: he makes the same kinds and the same frequency of errors as anyone else (…

> he makes the same kinds and the same frequency of errors as anyone else Putting this here because I don’t know where else to tell this story and I simply have to share: I flew into Munich a few months ago, and since I have an EU passport I was able to use the shorter self-scan line for EU citizens at passport control. In front of me was an older couple who was having trouble with getting their passports to scan. I…

I have mentioned this elsewhere online but I was once attending a talk in the computer history museum for which I had turned up early. An elderly gentleman took his seat right before me - it took me a while to process that it was Knuth (in reality, it was less to do with processing and more with accepting!).

Somewhat recently we spotted him at a Hitchcock movie festival at Palo Alto, which my wife and I were attending.

Random run-ins are surreal :-)

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#49

Post by fc417fc802 »

svat wrote: post #35
eigenvalue wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it the word “the” instead of “a”? Trying to think what else it could even be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083384

It's amusing that the same two commenters have essentially the same two comments side-by-side in both threads, years apart.

Re: Discovering errors in Donald Knuth's TAOCP

#50

Post by oefrha »

abhgh wrote: post #48
zoky wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he makes the same kinds and the same frequency of errors as anyone else Putting this here because I don’t know where else to tell this story and I simply have to share: I flew into Munich a few months ago, and since I have an EU passport I was able to use the shorter self-scan line for EU citizens at passport control. In front of me was an older couple who was having trouble with getting their passports to scan. I…

I have mentioned this elsewhere online but I was once attending a talk in the computer history museum for which I had turned up early. An elderly gentleman took his seat right before me - it took me a while to process that it was Knuth (in reality, it was less to do with processing and more with accepting!). Somewhat recently we spotted him at a Hitchcock movie festival at Palo Alto, which my wife and I were attendin…

Back when I was at Stanford a decade ago, I spotted him biking to/from Green Library quite a few times. You can probably run into him with some regularity if you make a habit of going to said library, assuming his routine hasn’t changed much ;)
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