
Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth (2014) - yamaneko
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2213858&WT.mc_id=Author_Knuth_20Questions
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dx034
Anyone 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.

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svat
I have read through about eight pages of one of Knuth's most recent pre-
fascicles.[1] It took me about a month (on and off). I did all the exercises
(trying the harder ones for at most a couple of hours or so before giving up),
wrote programs to explore the things introduced, etc. It was good, quite
doable, and a lot of fun. (Also, I found a few errors and got some of those
Knuth checks.)

The best way to view Knuth's project with these volumes is that takes in all
published computer science on a particular topic, digests it, and outputs into
the books some sort of "summary" of the field, or whatever he considers the
most important bits, but still organized as readable/learnable textbook
material, and in the way he thinks makes for best exposition. (In other words:
he's doing his best to explain, and his best is very good indeed. Often
Knuth's writing is clearer than the original papers, and a lot more fun.)

[1]:
[http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/](http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/knuth/)

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DataWorker
Interesting 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.

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_asummers
I 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.

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napsterbr
You'll definitely enjoy this:
[https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf](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

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albertzeyer
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!

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Zarathust
I was kind of expecting 12 more

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smitherfield
Or C more. :)

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flavio81
1100 more!

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debacle
It's interesting how this article made it to HN - From the post about the
potential proof surrounding P != NP yesterday, there was a great comment
thread on a bit of the history of proofs, where this link was shared.

