The key bit of why we do things like this: “useful for testing the value of the answers and for smoking out follow-on questions”. That statement is not about K

The key bit of why we do things like this: “useful for testing the value of the answers and for smoking out follow-on questions”. That statement is not about Knuth’s presumably beautiful work. It’s that the least deterministic (and most important) part of programming is discerning the value of doing the thing at all.