
The Complexity of Songs (1977) [pdf] - Hooke
http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/Software.coe/242-535_ADA/Background/Readings/knuth_song_complexity.pdf
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teddyh
“ _Music Was Better in the Sixties, Man_ ”

[http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/07/28/music-
wa...](http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2012/07/28/music-was-better-
in-the-sixties-man/)

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croo
The title of the paper is misleading and it made me dissapointed. This should
not be a tounge-in-the-cheek joke but should be about the complexity of a song
- but it only counts some verses and refrens. Doesn't even have to be a
song...

Anyhow I think a song gets more complex as it more commonly breaks the
patterns the human mind finds in them.

~~~
svat
Why do you say that something written and intended as a joke “should not” be a
tongue-in-cheek joke?

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croo
Because the topic was really interesting to me and I wanted to read about it!
:( It rarely happens that I read the title of a paper and immediately want
more than a peek. I got excited then got disappointed by a flat joke. Not
funny.

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enf
This paper always makes me sad because there are real things to be said about
the structure of repetition in music, but Knuth treats it as a joke.

~~~
svat
Does making a joke about something imply that there aren't “real” things to be
said about it?

To put it differently: here, Knuth heard a popular song that seems to be just
“That's the way uh huh uh huh I like it uh huh uh huh” repeated endlessly,
found it funny, and wrote an elaborate joke culminating in that observation,
hewing to the style of CS publications. Why does that make you sad? It's not
as if someone's bit of humour has prevented others from saying “real things”.

~~~
enf
It's not even a good joke. The song has two verses as well as the repetitive
chorus, and he ignores them for the sake of the joke.

~~~
svat
I find the whole paper very funny (see my other comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18048229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18048229))
but of course tastes can differ. Not sure though why you'd find it sad if
someone made a joke you don't find very funny.

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svat
In typical Knuth style, there are so many jokes here beyond the central idea
of the paper itself! With apologies for explaining jokes...

• _It is known [3] that almost all songs of length n require a text of length
~ n_ — here the reference [3] is not a reference to the musical literature as
one might expect, but a reference to Chaitin! This is similar to Kolmogorov
complexity, “almost all real numbers are uncomputable / undefinable”, etc. :-)

• _By the Distributive Law and the Commutative Law [4], we have_ — a reference
to Chrystal, the standard algebra textbook of the 19th century. (See also
Underwood Dudley's “What is Mathematics For?”)

• _possible to generalize this lemma [...] provided that the sequence <V_k>
satisfies a certain smoothness condition. Details will appear in a future
paper_ — typical papers (and of course even the author knows there will no
future paper) :-) Cf. Polya's “cheap” generalization.

• _The coefficient of √n was further improved by a Scottish farmer named O.
MacDonald_ — even when making a joke, he has a serious reference to Kennedy's
book on folk songs, giving the page number where other farmyard songs are
discussed. In fact the entire list of references is rather scholarly.

• _R₁ = ‘Ee-igh, ’² ‘oh! ’_ — the ² here is not a footnote, but “square”, i.e.
the string repeated two times

• The whole proof of Lemma 2 is a wonderful (and educational) formalization of
the song

• _Therefore if MacDonald 's farm animals ultimately have long names they
should make slightly shorter noises._

• _A fundamental improvement was claimed in England in 1824, when the true
love of U. Jack gave to him a total of 12 ladies dancing, 22 lords a-leaping,
30 drummers drumming, [...] during the twelve days of Christmas [11]_ — the
reference [11] is a reference to a MoMA artwork, see
[https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ben-shahn-titled-
book...](https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ben-shahn-titled-booklet-
signed-1727028409)

• _(see [7])_ — the [7] here is a faux reference; it reads ”U. Jack,
"Logarithmic growth of verses," _Acta Perdix_ 15 (1826), 1-65535” and apart
from “U. Jack” and the number of pages, note that “Perdix” = partridge

• _J. W. Blatz of Milwaukee, Wisconsin who first discovered a class of songs
known as "m Bottles of Beer on the Wall"; her elegant construction..._ — Knuth
is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and J. W. Blatz is
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Blatz_Brewing_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Blatz_Brewing_Company)

• _the song "I'll drink m if you'll drink m + 1." However, the English start
at m = 1 and get no higher than m = 9, possibly because they actually drink
the beer instead of allowing the bottles to fall._

• _all practical requirements for song generation with limited memory space.
In fact, 99 bottles of beer usually seemed to be more than sufficient in most
cases._

• _However, the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less
memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been
announced_

• [Well you should just read it]

• _Acknowledgment. I wish to thank J. M. Knuth and J. S. Knuth for suggesting
the topic of this paper._ — finally giving away the reason for the existence
of this article: these are his children; they were probably 12 and 10 at the
time.

