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Donald Knuth Check One of the most fabled computer scientists is Donald Knuth, based in Stanford, California
One of his fabled exploits was/is authoring a classic series of text and reference books:
- "The Art of Computer Programming" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming
in 3 classic computer text and reference volumes:published in 1968 through 1973.
- Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms
- Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms
- Volume 3: Sorting and Searching
Fragments of the much awaited
- Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms
have been appearing recently. WikipediaAs an incentive to study the books carefully, Don promised a financial reward to anyone who could find an error.
Knuth reward checkProgramming, as well as most human endeavors, is noted for "bugs" -
so indeed the books were studied VERY carefully. However, the books are noted for being complete, tight, and correct.
Check into http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/boss.html ;-))One of the joys of living in/near "Silicon" or "DataBase" Valley, depending on your viewpoint, is the high percentage of techie people. Several of the people I know have received Knuth Checks.
- Robert Garner
- Ken Shirriff
- Bob Smith
Yet Another Tale about Knuth
I received the check for determining the middle name of an IBM co-author on the earliest published papers on the ASCII character set encoding. "F. A. Williams” had apparently been on Don’s “most wanted list” for a decade or longer, as he let me know during my precious opportunity to sit with him during a CHM fellows award banquet after informing him that I was working at IBM Almaden Research. After some Watson-style sleuthing that resulted in his sister-in-law contacting me, we learned that the “A” stood for Aloysius.
Yes, you may post them.
One bug was a confusion between NOT-AND and AND-NOT in volume 4a page 574.
The other was suggesting that "erratic" wasn't a good word to describe deterministic faults in hardware logic.
Professor Knuth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth used to come to parties given by Grant Saviers http://ibm-1401.info/TeamBios.html#Saviers when Grant lived near San Jose. http://ibm-1401.info/Sched2005October.html#Wednesday%20October%2026th Knuth would sit at the piano and provided classical "background" music. I cannot distinguish the difference between an accomplished amateur pianist and a professional pianist. Apparently, a pipe organ is Knuth's instrument of choice - https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.htmlVideos: 1, 2