Knuth Plans 'Earthshaking Announcement' Wednesday 701
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Donald Knuth is planning to make an 'earthshaking announcement' on Wednesday, at TeX's 32nd Anniversary Celebration, on the final day of the TUG 2010 Conference. Unfortunately, nobody seems to know what it is. So far speculation ranges from proving P!=NP, to a new volume of The Art of Computer Programming, to his retirement. Maybe Duke Nukem Forever has been ported to MMIX?" Let the speculation begin.
Well...If its a TeX conference then... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's probably something about a clever algorithm for continuously updating the layout of a TeX like document in WYSIWG style. LyX is a nice tool, but it would be very cool to have a crisp realtime document layout algorithm. One you have the capability to do that with TeX source code, then I can imagine we'll see much richer non-MS-Word editing environments.... hopefully written in pure javascript so I can have a real document editor on the iMaxi or ChromeOldS
Re:P!=NP (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That he is... (Score:5, Interesting)
That he is a computer simulation fooling all of us for over 50 years...
I think you mean that we're all a computer simulation he has been running for over 50 years...
Re:I don't think proving P!=NP is earthshaking (Score:5, Interesting)
or just (Score:5, Interesting)
drink a beer, relax, and wait until tomorrow for the announcement. Which is sure to be disappointing now.
I predict he announces that computer programming is best practiced as a semi-automated assembly-line-style set of interchangeable tasks rather than an "art". He'll say that programming as an "art" is anachronistic. inefficient, and impractical, and that the conventional approach and the people who promote it have been holding back progress in software creation because a faster, cheaper, more modern, dumbed-down approach doesn't appeal to them professionally or aesthetically.
And then he'll announce his new software construction method that can be done by ordinary people with a short period of training for 1/5th what computer programmers make. It works great, but it's boring and repetitive and never creative. It delivers software in a predictable amount of time with a predictable budget and reasonable (also predictable) quality. And the development costs less than half of conventional approaches.
That's my prediction.
MMIX? MMX? (Score:3, Interesting)
I get the sense that this is a tongue-in-cheek announcement? It's 2010, so maybe it'll be the MMX machine?
Let's see. Wednesday: July 7, 2010 = 7-7-7DA. 20th anniversary of TeX. Hmm. I can't figure it out, but I'd put my money on an elegant technical curiosity which doubles as elaborate pun and extended joke, kind of like MMIX [stanford.edu].
<--- Flamewar starts here (Score:4, Interesting)
Knuth doesn't stand out amongst his peers in his field as much as those examples you've mentioned. Peers such as Turing, Shannon, Dijkstra, Boole, Babbage, von Neumann, Hopper... (etc.) are all more important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_scientists [wikipedia.org]
(disclaimer: i knew who Knuth was but i'm just not bothered by those that don't when there are so many prominent computer scientists)
Re:Who? (Score:3, Interesting)
***No, seriously - I've been working as a software engineer doing R&D work on complicated real time systems for years, and I'd never heard of his name***
Sigh -- Let me guess. You've never heard of Richard Hamming either? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming [wikipedia.org]
It has always seemed ironic to me that no one in the business seems to have actually read Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers and that The Art of Computer Programming is only half finished. It's no damn wonder that nothing related to software works quite right.
Re:John Carmack (Score:4, Interesting)
Works on space projects and still designs game engines.
He also married one of the world's most awesome women, Anna Kang. On their honeymoon, she let a pair of computers be set up in the hotel room so that he could program when the mood struck him. No woman I know would allow such a thing to happen.
Re:In surprising move ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not aware of any way. Back when karma was still written as a number, I knew mine, and just kept count after the switch to the unspecific words.
If anyone is interested, the reason they switched was because people complained about the following scenario:
This most likely still happens, but you can't see it any more.
Re:I speculate... (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that Knuth doesn't have an email account [stanford.edu], I'm betting it's one of these:
- Knuth now has his secretary sending tweets for him.
- Knuth got a Facebook account. It's literally a book of faces.
- Knuth has convinced his secretary to view the most popular YouTube videos on a daily basis, and then act them out. (Her kitten impressions are awesome.)
But seriously, I'm hoping that he's releasing his works under creative commons. Bibles are free in hotels, but if you want the bible of programming and algorithms, you have to pay $70 per volume!
Re:P!=NP (Score:4, Interesting)
one potential worry today tho is the lack of "downtime". That is, there are so many ways for us to not be bored that we basically have no real time to sit down and form grand mental models.
Re:Somebody found a bug in TeX? (Score:3, Interesting)
He has announced it, and he has paid. Many times. For some reason people rarely cached his checks but stuck them in frames instead. Since pictures of these ended up on the web, Knuth had to stop sending out checks. These days you can get a check from the Bank of San Seriffe instead [stanford.edu].