
HAKMEM (1972) [pdf] - mrdavidmoses
http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6086/AIM-239.pdf?sequence=2
======
gumby
HAKMEM instilled in me a lifelong love affair with the architecture of the
PDP-10.

This memo was quite influential on 14-year-old me, mainly because I could not
understand a word of it. It caused me to look many things up (which was hard
in the pre-web 70s) and served well to show me the depths of my lack of
understanding of the size and shape of the world. I ran into Gosper on one of
his vists east and though didn’t ask him about munching squares, I did receive
an unsolicited and incredibly valuable lesson on using the lispm debugger and
DDT. He’s still a friend today. RG was also highly influential, though in the
opposite way (he assumed I understood far more than I did so would pass along
crumbs in order not to waste my or his time). Nelson I’ve never met.

Are there still opportunities for random kids to be exposed to such things? It
feels like despite there being several orders more information now at your
fingertips that life has become more professionalized and constrained.

~~~
theoh
For most disciplines, there are places on the web where esoteric information
can be found. Wikipedia is very strong on math and computer science topics,
and I recognize the feeling that you are describing of realising how much
there is to learn. The hyperlinked nature of Wikipedia amplifies this.

The phenomenon of professionalization has probably made computing less of an
intellectual activity, and more of a routine business. Is that what your
perception is? It doesn't help that the signal-to-noise ratio is now much
lower.

~~~
gumby
> The phenomenon of professionalization has probably made computing less of an
> intellectual activity, and more of a routine business. Is that what your
> perception is?

Not just computing. Compared to my childhood in the 60s/70s (I'm gen X, though
my early childhood was not in the US), life is highly professionalized. Sport
used to be played by everyone, now even school kids specialize and have fancy
training. Music is less ad hoc though admittedly that had become a factory
product by the 60s.

And it was easier to tinker. Nowadays people talk of "building" a PC when they
are just gluing together lego blocks. That is great in that it opens up the
opportunity for many more people to program, but at a cost of hardware
tinkering. It used to be obvious by looking at a car motor what was going on.
Now they are boring.

When video games were starting they were a gateway to programming for lots of
kids. Now they are part of an ecosystem of toys that play with the kids
(rather than the kids playing with them) and are generally part of an
integrated marketing ecosystem ("franchise") that has characters and
storylines that integrate film, video, toys...where is open ended imagination?
Fandom is more consumption of someone else's thinking now than it used to be.

I know, sounds like a curmudgeon's lament.

> It doesn't help that the signal-to-noise ratio is now much lower.

I am not sure that's true. There's a survivorship bias in that we still read
the work of the greats, while most of the crud is lost. I recently tossed out
several shelves worth of old CS papers from the 60s-80s that I knew I'd never
look at again. Dead end CPU designs, absurd (in retrospect) claims, all sorts
of crud.

There is lots of fabulous thinking from the ancient Greeks, but what's
survived is an infinitesimal portion of what was produced...I assume none or
hardly any of what perished was worth re-reading.

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mrdavidmoses
The HAKMEM (the Hacker Memo) paper by Bill Gosper, details work done at the
MIT AI lab by the first known code hackers.

Stories about the MIT hackers (Bill Gosper,Richard Greenblatt, and Stewart
Nelson) are detailed in Steven Levy's book about the beginnings of the hacker
culture.

------
EdwardCoffin
The chess problem described in item 70 always surprised me. It just didn't
seem worthy of inclusion. A few years ago I happened across the book by Lasker
that it was drawn from and found that they'd made a typo in their description
of the problem (bishop should be at KB8, not KB7), one that still makes it a
mate-in-3 as described, but nowhere as interesting as what it should have
been.

I wrote it up in /r/chess: Problem 66 from Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood by
Lasker: white to mate in 3 [1]

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/73h23o/problem_66_fr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/73h23o/problem_66_from_chess_for_fun_chess_for_blood_by/)

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saagarjha
I’m trying to make sense of what this document is: it seems to me random
trivia that the MIT AI Lab produced in a relatively unstructured format? Am I
understanding this right?

~~~
veddox
Yes. From the Jargon File:

> A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks
> contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo
> really is “HAKMEM”, which is a 6-letterism for ‘hacks memo’.) Some of them
> are very useful techniques, powerful theorems, or interesting unsolved
> problems, but most fall into the category of mathematical and computer
> trivia.

([http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/HAKMEM.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/HAKMEM.html))

------
nathell
Smells like an MIT incarnation of the Scottish Book [1].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Book)

~~~
camtarn
That's quite a wonderful story - in particular:

"Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes ... For problem 153,
which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's "basis
problem", Stanisław Mazur offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was
solved only in 1972 by Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a
ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland."

------
rundigen12
In HTML format:
[http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/hakmem.html](http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/hakmem/hakmem.html)

------
aportnoy
Oh no, Kolmogorov is referred to as Komolgoroff in item 105.

This problem is in fact due to Kazimierz Kuratowski:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuratowski%27s_closure-
complem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuratowski%27s_closure-
complement_problem)

------
sn41
Some of the memos contain original mathematical research of high quality: for
example, Gosper's algorithm for continued fraction arithmetic is original [1],
even mathematicians like Lagrange did not mention anything about arithmetic
operations on continued fractions [2].

[1]
[https://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/cf.html](https://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/cf.html)

[2]
[https://archive.org/details/lecturesonelemen00lagruoft/page/...](https://archive.org/details/lecturesonelemen00lagruoft/page/4)

------
zzo38computer
I have read HAKMEM (I think I had first read it in the twenty-first century),
and I like this. I don't know PDP-10 programming, but I hope that I can learn,
so that I can understand some more of the stuff in the HAKMEM, some of which
is difficult if you do not know PDP-10 programming. Is there emulation
available?

~~~
mindcrime
_Is there emulation available?_

Looks like there may be:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/pdp10_enthusiasts_r...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/pdp10_enthusiasts_resurrect_ancient_mit_operating_system/)

------
dang
Some previous discussions:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hakmem%20points%3E3&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hakmem%20points%3E3&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

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baruchel
My ePub version of the paper:
[https://github.com/baruchel/misc/tree/master/contribs](https://github.com/baruchel/misc/tree/master/contribs)

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Jyaif
"As we all know, connections to phone lines are illegal unless made through a
data coupler supplied by TPC (The Phone Company)"

Ah!

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ymerej
I liked the reference to the "String Handling Interpretive Translator".

------
jxub
[pdf]

