

Don Knuth releases Volume 4, Pre-fascicle 6A [gzipped ps] - dhruvbird
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc6a.ps.gz

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rrmm
On page 29, Knuth says, "We can regard both variables and clauses as active
agents, who continually tweet to their neighbors in this social network." This
in the context of statistical physics.

Seeing Knuth talk about tweets feels weird.

On another note, anyone actually run into a random k-SAT problem in "real
life"?

~~~
brandall10
More than weird, will a 'tweet' have relevance 50 years from now? Even a
social network? Seems using things that have a temporal cultural context is a
bit iffy.

Granted, I haven't mustered the courage to begin reading TAOCP, but my
impression is it's a timelessly relevant masterwork for the man.

~~~
rrmm
> _More than weird, will a 'tweet' have relevance 50 years from now? Even a
> social network? Seems using things that have a temporal cultural context is
> a bit iffy._

I don't think Knuth is under any illusions about staying relevant: The
original editions had code examples for a machine having 6-bit bytes and used
self-modifying code to store the return address of subroutines rather than a
stack.

In later editions he updated the examples, but even with respect to algorithms
the new fascicles make references to quite recent papers and results. The
books as timeless as they are, are products of their time more so than most
books on mathematical topics.

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walrus
Just curious: how did you find this? I don't see a link to it anywhere on
Knuth's website. The only reference I can find to it is on Twitter[1].

[1] <https://twitter.com/pervognsen/status/230892091188846592>

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rosh
It was on Reddit a few days ago...
<http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/xb6ft/>

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ScotterC
Would prefer a warning that it's a download link.

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dhruvbird
Fixed

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insaneirish
Change the link.

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dhruvbird
I can't edit it any more. It seems that the edit timeout has been reached.

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sp332
Any suggestions for software to read this on a desktop?

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eru
Gnome's standard document reader Evince works out of the box. As does Okular,
KDE's standard reader. (Evince is also available for Windows, I don't know
about Okular.)

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jinmingjian
a (very incomplete) draft of section 7.2.2.2...still great

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jk
It is not a gzipped file; open with any postscript viewer.

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cnvogel
It is gz-compressed, but (1) your browser might decompresses it on the fly
after seeing the "Content-Encoding: x-gzip" and (2) most postscript viewers
decompress on the fly as gzipped postscript is so prevalent.

    
    
        $ curl -s http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc6a.ps.gz | dd bs=16 count=1 | xxd
    
        0000000: 1f8b 0808 689e 1150 0203 6661 7363 3661  ....h..P..fasc6a

~~~
eru
> [...] most postscript viewers decompress on the fly as gzipped postscript is
> so prevalent.

Not only prevalent, but also the right thing to do. PDF was an attempt to
(among other aims) achieve smaller filesizes than PS. But that was premature
optimization: While a PS file is usually bigger than a PDF, gzipped PS beats
PDF.

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bulibuta
Just made my morning, thanks!

