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Donald Knuth: Algorithms, Complexity, Life, and the Art of Programming [video]
- haecceity 7y agoKnuth thinks machine learners are not geeks. What do you guys think. Also he defines geek as people having certain qualities like understanding systems at different levels of abstraction.
- dragontamer 7y ago> Knuth thinks machine learners are not geeks I don't like games of telephone. Do you have a particular point in the video where Knuth says this? It will help to hear what Knuth says with his argument before I make a counterpoint (or maybe even agree with him).
- haecceity 7y ago26:14
- dragontamer 7y agoI think it is unfair to apply: > Also he defines geek as people having certain qualities like understanding systems at different levels of abstraction. Knuth said this around the 7-minute mark. Nearly 20-minutes earlier than the machine-learning question. The discussion moved on, and I'm not entirely sure the two parts you bring up are related at all.
- pm90 7y agoDoes it matter?
- threatofrain 7y agoIMO he's saying ML people are fundamentally scientists, and scientists care more about the data than the techniques; an applied machine learning expert is in some ways a domain empiricist. A geek perhaps is somebody who enjoys tinkering with systems and methods in and of itself. Naturally there is some intersection, but these are all soft terms anyway. IMO geeks have lost overall everywhere, replaced by mainstream commercial interests because the tech world needed to grow very fast.
- K0SM0S 7y agoI agree with you. Just about the best 'proofs' I get in social-chaotic topics like this is by going to the extremes: - a "total" or "100%" data scientist researching ML might spend the better part of his days in an office, without a computer, just thinking on a whiteboard and paper. He then hands specs for tech people to translate, implement, run (code, systems, workflow). - "geek" means passionate (early 20th century word to describe "bookworms"), thus it may apply to anything — nowadays it's applied implicitly, without specifying further, to technology, "geek" means "tech geek". In that sense, whatever they do, geeks are never far from machines, gadgets, supercomputers (!?), some ethernet patch... Both actually have nothing to do with each other, and do not seem mutually exclusive to me; but in the extreme range of the spectrum, they clearly are totally different people with unrelated concerns and, most likely, jobs. But that's all fluff and you have to thank idling geeks for writing such blabla. (though I hear HR loves that kind of reports, profiling makes the world so easy, right? Hey, what do you know, someone somewhere might copy/paste these threads for a living as we speak).
- yzh 7y agoThis also reflects in Von Karman's saying: Scientists discover the world that exists, engineers create the world that never was.
- OldGuyInTheClub 7y agoLoving the video. I have a couple of volumes of TAOCP. Even though I am not in CS, the series is so well known and so respected that it is a must-have. I'll periodically leaf through some pages and have a hard time grasping how much work he must have put in, how many papers he must have read - good, bad, and indifferent - to extract the best and put them all in context. No wonder he gave up email before most people even heard of it and decades before it became cool. I saw him many times on the Stanford campus in the late 1980s when I was a grad student in chemistry. Never went up to say hello and to thank him for TeX.
- haecceity 7y agoI think he has a secretary that does emails for him. Also he responded to my email a few years ago.
- OldGuyInTheClub 7y agoThat's quite an accomplishment. I hear that people who get a reward check from him for errata or other help usually frame them instead of cashing them. According to this, he has a secretary that filters messages for him: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- haecceity 7y agoDon't be too impressed, I didn't get a cheque. He's just a really nice guy.
- nirvdrum 7y agoFYI, he stopped sending checks back in 2008 due to check fraud: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check. It's a shame. I had a professor that had received one for finding a bug somewhere and he proudly displayed it in his office. It was a pretty good conversation starter.
- rsiqueira 7y agoThis is the conversation between Lex Fridman (MIT) and Donald Knuth, the legendary computer scientist & mathematician. Lex Fridman's podcast is my favorite and it's about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He says: "To me AI is bigger than computing, it is our civilization's journey into understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine.".
- gigatexal 7y agoYup. Lex’s interviewing style is like how I would do it. He’s a gem and I’m so glad he is doing this podcast.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pm90 7y agoLink to podcast for the lazy https://lexfridman.com/ai/ https://lexfridman.com/ai/. Looks good, thanks for sharing! I've had a hard time finding podcasts that have a conversational style that I enjoy; so far I like only https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/, but this one looks really promising.
- squiggleblaz 7y agoThoughts on CoRecursive? It's a conversational interview podcast that I like about topics that are relevant.
- bausano_michael 7y agoI recommend Mindscape by Sean Carroll. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast
- MattRix 7y agoI found Lex's podcast a few months ago after hearing his George Hotz interview. It's now become my favourite podcast. I really like the mix of technical and philosophical questions, often about the future of humanity.
- enriquto 7y agoIs there a text transcript of this interview?
- lowdose 7y agoYou could try to download the auto generated subtitles with youtube-dl.
- enriquto 7y agoSure, but I'm just surprised that such a high-level interview is not available in a curated textual form, sanctioned by the interviewer.
- bkemmer 7y agoYou can give money via patreon to support this effort.
- K0SM0S 7y agoOr better yet, do it oneself: about 70 episodes, 7 billion people and change, it only takes 1 out of 100 million of us to transcribe 1 episode each to clear the work. Hint: on a desktop browser, beneath the video you may click the "..." menu, select "Open transcript" and voila, you may copy/paste the whole (though UX is awful, I have yet to find a "copy all" button). Here's a pastebin with minimal formatting for your perusal: https://pastebin.com/RQYhREEc https://pastebin.com/RQYhREEc
- janvdberg 7y agoSpeaking about Knuth audiofiles/podcasts, I recently created a RSS feed for the Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About" audio files (https://j11g.com/knuth.xml https://j11g.com/knuth.xml). This way you can listen to it in your favorite podcast player. For example, I added the feed to Overcast: https://overcast.fm/p1120847-YM0aS7 https://overcast.fm/p1120847-YM0aS7
- fatboy 7y agoThanks for this. I've just subscribed.
- OldGuyInTheClub 7y agoThe Web of Stories interview from the late 1990s is also good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1JqyQki3wdoGrCn https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq...
- damnruskie 7y agoMan do I wish I knew about something like this on Android
- nabla9 7y agoHis answer to the last question is great. ;)
- jcrubino 7y agoDid Dr. Knuth stopped giving the Christmas Tree lecture this last year? Is the Fridman interview the replacement?
- madmax108 7y agoNo, no. The Christmas lecture happened this year as well (the 25th year in fact!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DKo219ZHMw&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DKo219ZHMw&feature=emb_titl... As is usual from Prof. Knuth, it's great with tonnes of nuggets of wisdom, especially if you are a fan of easter eggs (though his "style" of presentation bothers quite a few of my friends)! :)
- abhgh 7y agoIt happened this year and it was packed. So much so that when I reached 10 min late, there were so many people (standing) that I couldn't actually see Knuth even though I was technically inside the Nvidia auditorium, Stanford. Could only see the overhead screen. Tried standing on my toes and kept craning my neck to no avail, so had to leave disappointed :-( PS: I did get to attend and see him last year so that's something.
- simplegeek 7y agoI am curious, what is his chair he talks about?
- QuotedForTruth 7y agoAll he says is "I found this chair that was designed by a Swedish guy". Its black and looks like leather with a high cushioned back. That isn't a lot to go on. I searched and it doesn't seem to be something he has talked about before either. I was interested too, but to be honest, its probably pretty unlikely that the perfect chair for Knuth is the perfect chair for me or you too.
- mindcrime 7y agoYou gotta love Donald Knuth. What a guy. And what a project TAOCP has turned into. I just hope like crazy that he actually finishes it. I hate to even entertain the possibility but Robert Jordan's name comes to mind right now. Sadly, Knuth is not a young man, and there appears to be a lot of material left to write.
- commandlinefan 7y agoNot only is there a lot of material left to write, Knuth is the greatest Yak Shaver in history: when he realized that the typography available for his next volume was substandard, he put off writing it for 30 years to revolutionize typography (not that I'm complaining!) Then when he picked it up, he realized his bespoke assembler language was out of date so he invented a new one first. He did finally get around to publishing part of another volume, though.
- svat 7y agoActually this is only partly true. Here's a compressed timeline of books and other works of Knuth: 1962: Starts writing TAOCP. 1968, 1969, 1973: Volume 1, 1st edition. 1969: Volume 2, 1st edition. 1973: Volume 3, 1st edition. 1974: Turing Award. 1974: Volume 1, 2nd edition. 1974: Surreal Numbers (written in 6 days “and on the 7th day he rested”). 1976: Mariages Stables et leurs relations avec d'autres problèmes combinatoires. 1977 February: Receives galley of Volume 2 2nd edition (publishers have switched from hot-metal typesetting (Monotype) to phototypesetting, is dissatisfied with typography and excited by the possibility of getting it right with digital typesetting). Plans to have galleys ready in the summer :-) 1978 January: Gives Gibbs lecture (“Mathematical Typography”) on his ongoing research, unexpectedly many people are excited and want to use TeX. 1978: Finishes first version of TeX (aka TeX78, in SAIL) 1980: Starts work on rewrite of TeX (so that it can be used outside SAIL). 1981: Mathematics for the Analysis of Algorithms. 1981: Volume 2, 2nd edition. Realizes fonts still look bad on paper, starts getting more font design feedback from the masters. 1982: Finishes TeX, starts rewrite of METAFONT. 1984: Finishes METAFONT. 1986: Volumes ABCDE of Computers and Typesetting 1990: Announces end of his work on TeX and METAFONT (will only fix major bugs; others can continue writing other programs) 1992, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2003, 2010, 2011, 2011: Eight (plus one) volumes of collected papers. 1989: Mathematical Writing (lecture notes) 1990: 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (stratified random sampling of the Bible, with illustrations by many designers). 1992: Axioms and Hulls. 1993: CWEB. 1993: The Stanford GraphBase (some toy programs in CWEB). 1994: Concrete Mathematics. 1997: Volume 1, 3rd edition 1997: Volume 2, 3rd edition 1998: Volume 3, 3rd edition 1999: MMIXware 2001: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (based on 1999 lectures at MIT on religion) 2005: Volume 4 Fasc 2 (part of Volume 4A later) 2005: Volume 4 Fasc 3 (part of Volume 4A later) 2006: Volume 4 Fasc 4 (part of Volume 4A later) 2008: Volume 4 Fasc 0 (part of Volume 4A later) 2009: Volume 4 Fasc 1 (part of Volume 4A later) 2011: Volume 4A. 2015: Volume 4, Fasc 6 (middle third of Volume 4B) 2018: Fantasia Apocalyptica Illustrated 2019/2020: Volume 4, Fasc 5 (first third of Volume 4B) Planned: ????: Volume 4, Fasc 7 and 8 (last third of Volume 4B) 2025 (yeah right): Volume 5 So although he definitely badly underestimated how much time the typography project would take (he thought it would be done in a summer! then again, he also thought in 1962 that he'd be done with TAOCP in a year or two), and although it's technically correct that 38 years passed between 1973 (1st edition of Volume 3) and 2011 (Volume 4A), he wasn't spending all of it on typography; much of it was spent on other projects and on producing new editions (which in his case are a lot of work!) of earlier TAOCP volumes and other books. And even during the period 1977-1989 when he was working primarily on typography, he somehow managed to publish about 50 papers (P77 to P125), 60 other papers (Q48 to Q110), and 20 reports (R35 to R55): https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf (I really wish someone would parse his vita.tex from https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.html, make it machine-readable and put it on a nice webpage sortable by year and topic and listing newer editions etc).
- carapace 7y ago"Kuh-nooth"? The K isn't silent? Have I been saying it wrong all these years?
- fmela 7y agoYes, yes, and yes. It's in his FAQ: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html
- carapace 7y ago's what I get for being a recluse. I really have to get out more often.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI've always pronounced the K, I'm amazed if it turns out I've been saying it right all these years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- killjoywashere 7y agoHe mentions (and shows) a favorite paper tablet he uses with very finely ruled lines. He found it in Canada about 40 years ago while visiting his sister. Anybody know who makes his tablets? discussion here: https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8?t=2587 https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8?t=2587
- techbio 7y agoFor those curious about the game of Hex mentioned at(59:35) https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4&v=2BdBfsXbST8&t=59m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9n... There is a John Nash connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)
- superpermutat0r 7y agoAnyone knows which are the four Japanese people he mentiones expanding on his idea, then him finding out about it, generalizing it even more, writing code and playing around with it and then writing the final report? He was being really non-specific about the problem. I'm interested in his writings now when he is no longer actively publishing research. For example, that latest proof golf https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229#comment-1815290 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229#comment-1815290 was such a joy to read.
- svat 7y agoHe is still actively publishing! TAOCP Vol 4 Fascicle 5 (which is going to be the first one-third of Volume 4B) came out less than a month ago, and it contains a lot of material and ideas that have never been published anywhere before. To answer your specific question, I'm positive he's referring to Dancing Links: see section 7.2.2.1 in the published fascicle, or his draft (pre-fascicle 5c) at https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5c.ps.gz https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc5c.ps.gz -- the idea originally came from Hirosi Hitotumatu and Kohei Noshita (1979), then Knuth popularized it under the name "Dancing Links" (2000?), then the idea of "Dancing with ZDDs" was by Masaaki Nishino, Norihito Yasuda, Shin-ichi Minato, Masaaki Nagata (2017), and he's extended it to Algorithm Z in this publication.
- superpermutat0r 7y agoThank you very much. I've already read more than 50 pages and I love it. It's just incredible how much problems can be now solved by a faster algorithm. I had an idea of solving lotto design problems, this might be a way to do it quickly.