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by PhantomGremlin
3077 days ago
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It's been 40 years or so since I read TAOCP in any depth. But you seem pretty familiar with it, so I'll ask you the following, maybe you remember: I think it was somewhere in Volumes 1, 2 or 3 (but maybe an entirely different book not even by Knuth) where one of the exercises says something like: 19. M50 ...solve this quite complex problem .... For the instructor who assigns all odd numbered exercises. A little bit of humor in an otherwise quite dry set of books. |
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I don't remember that particular one, but there are odd bits of humor throughout his work. "MIX is the world's first polyunsaturated computer."
Browsing through it again, I see a reference in section 1.2.8 about Fibonacci numbers, problem 37 references a paper by R. E. Gaskell and M. J. Whinihan. I worked with Mike Whinihan in a previous lifetime. He got his PhD in economics at U of Chicago in just three years, to the dismay of his classmates. He wrote that paper "Fibonacci Nim" when he was in High School. And looking at the beginning of Chapter 2 "Information Structures" he mentions structures in "algebraic language like FORTRAN, C, or Java" (third edition). In the first edition, neither C nor Java had yet been invented.