YouSaid · the spoken record

Donald Knuth

lines on the record: 150
first: 2021-09-09
most recent: 2021-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Spring to life was because I had drafted this paper atomic theory. Can be useful, which was seen by Vaughan, and then By Jim, and then we combine because maybe they had also been thinking of writing something up about it. String match. It should be the string magic problem period.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this was for me a change in life. I started to say maybe I should learn more. And I showed this note to Vaughn Pratt, and he said, that's similar to something I was working on. And then, and Jim Morris was at Berkeley too at the time. Anyway, he's had an illustrious career, but I haven't kept track of Jim. But one is my colleague at Stanford and my student later. But this was before Bon was still a graduate student and hadn't come to Stanford yet. So we found out that we'd all been working on the same thing. So it was our algorithm we had each discovered it independently, but each of us had discovered a different part of the elephant. Aspect of it so we could put our things together with my job to write the paper.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was something that you published in journals, and it was interesting stuff, but here was a case where I couldn't figure out how to write the program. I had a theorem for automata theory. Then I knew how to write the program.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the problem I had started with was not the string matching problem, but then I realized that the string matching problem was another thing which would also be done by a stack automaton. And so when I looked at what that told me, then I had a nice algorithm for this string matching problem. And it told me exactly what I should remember as I'm going through the string. And I worked it out. And I wrote this little paper called Automata Theory Can Be Useful. And the reason was that it was first, I mean, I had been reading all kinds of papers about automatic theory, but it never taught me my programming for everyday problems.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I couldn't figure out a fast way to do it on a regular computer. I thought I was a pretty good programmer. But by golly, I couldn't think of any way to recognize this language efficiently So I went through Steve Cook's construction. I filled my Blackboard with all everything that Stack Tomathon Dodd did. I wrote down and then I tried to see patterns in that. And how did he convert that into a computer program on a regular machine? And finally, I psyched it out. What was the thing I was missing so that I could? Oh, yeah, this is what I should do in my program. And now I have an official program. And so I would never have thought about that if I hadn't had his theorem, which was purely abstract thing.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can tell you afterwards EDCBA, it doesn't have any other memory except this one thing that it can see. And Steve Cook proved this amazing thing that says if a stack automaton can recognize a language. Where the strings of the language are length n in any amount of time whatsoever. So the stack automaton might use a zillion steps. A regular computer can recognize that same language in time n log n. So Steve had a way of transforming a computation that goes on and on and on and on into using different data structures into something that you can do on a regular computer. The stack of Tamsan goes slow, but somehow the fact that it can do it at all means that there has to be a fast way. So I thought this was a pretty cool theorem. And so I tried it out on the problem. Where I knew a stach automaton could do it.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About palindromes or something like that. He wasn't really Juan wasn't working on text searching, but he was working on an abstract problem that was related. Well, at that time, Steve Cook was a professor at Berkeley. And it was the greatest mistake that Berkeley CS department made was not to give him tenure. So Steve went to Toronto, but I knew Steve, while he was at Berkeley, and he had come up with a very peculiar theorem about a technical concept called a stac automaton. And a stack automaton is a machine that it can't do everything, a Turing machine can do, but it can only look at something at the top of a stack or it can put more things on the stack or it can take things off the stack. It can't remember a long string of symbols, but it can remember them in reverse order. So if you tell a stack atomic on ABCDE.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So he worked it out and he put it into the system software at Berkeley, I think it was, where he was writing some Berkeley Unix, I think, with some routine I was supposed to find occurrences of patterns in text. And We didn't explain it, and so he found out that several months later somebody had. Had looked at it, didn't look right until they ripped it out. So he had this algorithm, but it didn't make it through. Because what wasn't understood. Nobody knew about this particularly Von Pratt also had independently discovered a year or two later. I forget why. I think Vaughn was studying some. Technical problem.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, and Jim Morris noticed. There was a more clever way. To do it, the obvious way would have started, let's say we found that letter M at character position 1000. So started next at character position 1001. But he said, no, look, we already read the O and the R, and we know that they aren't M's. So we can start, we don't have to read those over again. And this gets pretty tricky when the word isn't Morris, but it's more like Abra Cadabra where you have patterns that are occurring.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a large piece of text, and it's all one long one-dimensional thing, first letter, second letter, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so the question you'd like to be able to do this quickly. And the obvious way is, let's say we're looking for Morris. So we would go through and wait till we get to letter M. Then we look at the next word and sure enough it's an O and then an R. But then too bad the next letter is E. So we missed out on Morris. And so we go back and start looking for another all over again. So that's the obvious way to do it.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all right, so it should be actually Morris Pratt Knuth, but we decided to use alphabetical order when we published the paper. The problem is something that everybody knows now if they're using a search engine. You have a large collection of text and you want to know if the word canoe with appear is anywhere in the text or some other word that's less interesting than anyway.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I claim that that number is so mind-boggling that you can't comprehend how large it is. But anyway, Feynman, I talked to Feynman about this, and he said, oh. Let's just use double arrow, but instead of taking integers, let's consider complex numbers. I mean, okay, X arrow two, that means X to the X. But what about X double arrow 2.5? Well, that's not too hard to figure out. That's interpolate between those. But what X double arrow? Or one plus i or some complex number. And so he claimed that there was no analytic function that would do the job. But I didn't know how he could claim that that wasn't true. And his next question was, did then have a complex number of arrows? Yeah, okay.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I put in one arrow and I get x to the nth power. Now I put in two arrows and that takes x to the x to the x to the x to the x n times power. So in other words, if it's two Double arrow three that would be That would be 2 to the 2 to the 2. So that would be 2 to the fourth power, that'd be 16. Okay. So that's the double arrow. And now you can do a triple arrow, of course, and so on. And I had this paper called, well, essentially big numbers. You try to impress your friend by saying a number they've never thought of before And I gave a special name for it and designed a font for it that has script K and so on, but it really is 10, I think like 10 quadrupolero 3 or something like that.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computation he was doing. So there was one thing that I was never able to. I wish I'd had more time to work out with him, but I guess I could describe it for you. There's something that got my name attached to it Called Knuth Arrow Notation, but it's a notation for very large numbers. And so I find out that somebody invented it in the 1830s. It's fairly easy to understand anyway. So you start with X plus X plus X plus XN times. And you can call that XN. So Xn is multiplication. Then you take x times x times x times x and n time. That gives you exponentiation x to the nth power. So that's one arrow. So XN with no arrows is multiplication. Arrow N is X to the nth power.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From reading about it in Scientific American. But when I read how they described it to each other talking about eigenvalues and various mathematical terms that made sense, then it made sense to me. But Hawking said that every formula you put in a book, you lose half of your readers. And so he didn't put any formulas into the book. So I couldn't understand his book at all. You could say you understood it, but I really didn't.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, statistical mechanics. So I study statistical mechanics in certain, I mean, random processes are related to algorithms in a lot of ways, but there are lots of different flavors of physics as there are different flavors of mathematics as well. But the thing is that I don't see... Actually, when they talk to physicists use a completely different language than when they're talking to, when they're writing expository papers. So I didn't understand quantum mechanics at all.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then this is more continuous. Yeah, I'm not sure if Turing would have been a great visit to think it was a pretty good chemist, I don't know. But anyway, I see things. I believe that computer science is largely driven by people who have brains who are good at resonating with certain kind of concepts. And quantum computers, it takes a different kind of brain.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it. I mean, some of my computer scientist friends are really good at physics and others are not. And I'm really good at algebra, but not at geometry. Talk about different parts of mathematics. So they're different kinds of physical, but physicists think of things in terms of waves. And I can think of things in terms of waves, but it's like a dog walking on hind legs if I'm thinking of.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's quite different in my opinion. I started as a physics major and I switched into math. Probably the reason was that I could get A on the physics exam, but I never had any idea why I would have been able to come up with the problems that were on those exams. But in math, I knew why the teacher set those problems and I thought of other problems that I could set to. And I believe it's quite a different mentality.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's very much like what we were talking about if you want the computer, if you want to be able to believe the answer computer is. One of the things Bob showed me in the 60s, there was a, he loved this cartoon. There were two guys standing in front of, in those days, a computer was a big thing. And the first guy says to the other guy, this machine can do in one second what it would take a million people to do in a hundred years. And the other guy says, oh, so how do you know it's right?”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially said they were teaching all the physics students the wrong way they were just they were just learning how to pass exams and not learning any physics and he said you know if you want me to prove it you know here I'll turn any page of this textbook and I'll tell you what's wrong with this page and he did so and and the textbook had been written by his host and and it was a big embarrassing incident but he had previously asked his host if he was supposed to tell the truth but but anyway it epitomizes the way education goes wrong in all kinds of fields and has to periodically be brought back From a process of giving credentials to a process of giving knowledge.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we used to go to each other's lectures. But if I saw him sitting in the front row, it would throw me for a loop, actually. I would miss a few. Few sentences What unique story do I have? I mean, I often refer to his His time in Brazil where he”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But two different people will have to learn how to compromise and work together and you're going to have ups and downs and crises and so on. And so as long as you don't set your expectation on having 24 hours of bliss, then there's a lot of hope for stability. But if you decide that there's going to be no frustration.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That day that I asked her about her roommate. I mean, no, okay, so I don't mind telling these things depending on how far you go. Let me tell you this that I... I never really enjoyed kissing until I found how she did it.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, yeah. No, There were tearful times trying to learn certain concepts, but I learned art from her. And so we worked together occasionally in design projects, but every year we write a Christmas card and we each have to. Compromise our own notions of beauty. Yes.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we celebrated 60 years of Wedded Bliss last month, and we met because I was dating her roommate. This was my sophomore year, her freshman year. I was dating her roommate and I wanted her advice on strategy or something like this. And anyway, I found I enjoyed her advice better than I enjoyed her roommate”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It started with a napkin, but we would run into each other. The next really, I was giving lectures in Montreal. I'm giving a series of Of seven lectures about a topic called stable marriages. And he arrived in Montreal between my sixth and seventh lecture. And we met at a party. And I started telling him about the topic I was doing. And he sat and thought about it. He came up with a beautiful theory to show that in technical terms it's that the set of all stable marriages forms a lattice. And there was a simple way to find the greatest lower bound of two stable pairings and least upper bound of two stable married. And so I could use it in my lecture the next day. And he came up with this theorem during the party”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Puzzles that I'd never heard of before. He had a great way to solve the game of solitaire. Many of the common interests that he'd never written up. But anyway, then in the summertime, I took another week off and went to a place in the mountains of Norway and rewrote the book using the correct vaccine. So that was the most intensive connection with Conway. After that,”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain I have no idea, but anyway, it was almost as if I was channeling. So the book was typed. They sent it to Conway. And he said, well, Don, you got the one axiom wrong. Is there a difference between Less than or equal and not greater than. The opposite of being greater than. And less than or equal. But anyway, technically, it can make a difference when you're developing a logical theory. And the way I had chosen was harder to do than John's original. So, and we visited him at his house in Cambridge in April. We took a boat actually from Norway over across the channel and so on and stayed with him for some days. And he talked about all kinds of Of things he had.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flows from that, but you have to discover why. And every mistake that I make as I'm trying to discover it, my characters make too. And so it's a long, long story, but I work through this week and it was one of the most intense weeks of my life. And I described it in other plays. But anyway, after six days, I finished it, and on the seventh day I rested and I sent to my secretary to type it. It was flowing as I was writing it faster than I could think almost. But after I finished and tried to write a letter to my secretary telling her how to type it, I couldn't write anymore.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the thing is, I had lost that napkin in which he wrote the theory. I looked for it, but I couldn't find it. So I tried to recreate from memory what he had told me at that lunch in Calgary. And as I wrote the book, I was going through exactly what the characters in the book were supposed to be doing. So I start with the two axioms that start out the whole thing and everything is defined.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we figured out we'd always wonder what he'd like to have a fair enough hotel room. So we figured out that she would visit me twice during the week. Things like this, you know, we would try to sneak in. This was, hotel was run by a mission organization. These ladies were probably very strict. But anyway, so.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I had also read a book in dialogue by Alfred Renee where it was kind of a Socratic thing where the two characters were talking to each other about mathematics. And so at the end in the morning, I woke up my wife and said, Jill, I think I want to write a book about Conway's theory. You know I'm supposed to be writing the art of computer programming, doing all this other stuff, but I got. But I really want to write this other book. And so we made this plan. But I said, I thought I could write it in a week. And we made the plan then. So in January. I rented a room in a hotel in downtown Oslo. We were in sabbatical in Norway. And I rented the hotel in downtown Oslo and did nothing else except right up Conway's theory. And I changed the name to surreal numbers. And so this book is now published as Surreal Numbers.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was there, yeah, because I had to, you know, I was at the same conference For some reason, I happened to be in Calgary at the same day that he was visiting Calgary. And it was spring of 72, I'm pretty sure. And we had lunch together. And he wrote down during the lunch on a napkin All of the facts about what he called numbers. And he covered the napkin with the theorems about his idea of numbers. And I thought it was incredibly beautiful. And later in 1972, my sabbatical year began and I went to Norway. And in December of that year, in the middle of the night, Thought came to me you know, Conway's theory about numbers would be a great thing to teach students how to invent research and what the joys are of research.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you were minus 20 years over or something. I don't know, 1967. But there was a conference where. And I think I was speaking about. Something that's known as the Knuth Bendix algorithm now, but he gave famous talk about knots. And I didn't know at the time, but anyway, that talk had now the source of thousands and thousands of papers since then. And he was reported on something that he had done in high school almost 10 years earlier. Before this conference, but he never published it. And he climaxed his talk by building some, you have these little plastic things that you can stick together. It's something like Lego, but easier And so he made a whole bunch of knots in front of the audience and so on and then disassembled. So it was a dramatic lecture before he had learned how to give even more dramatic lectures later. All right.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, all of those things. But let's see, when did I first meet him? I guess I first met him at Oxford in 1967 when I was.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in fact, I'm just reading now the issue of mathematical intelligence that came in last week. It's a whole issue devoted to remembrance of him.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I I've got a dozen exercises in volume. For fascicle six that actually worked rather well for that purpose. Bill Gospers came up with the algorithm that allows Gali to run thousands and thousands of times faster. You know the website called Gali?”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the game of life is wonderful. And shows all kinds of. About how things can evolve without the creator understanding anything more than the power of learning in a way. But to me, the most important thing about the game of life is how it focused for me What it meant to have free will or not. Because the game of life is obviously totally deterministic. And I find it hard to believe that anybody who's ever had children cannot believe in free will. On the other hand This makes it crystal clear. John Conway said. He wondered whether it was immoral to shut the computer off after he got into a particularly interesting play of the game of life.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right, and one of them is winning, and that's affecting the next sentence and so on. And there was this book Machine intelligence or something”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He actually has a machine language in which you can write code and test hypotheses. And so we might have a big breakthrough. My personal feeling is that consciousness, the best model I... I've heard of to explain the miracle of consciousness is that That somehow inside of our brains we're having a Continual survival for the fittest competition. As I'm speaking to you, all the possible things I might be wanting to say are”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't misunderstand me. I certainly don't disagree with that at all. And even at these lectures that we had took 20 years ago, there were neurologists pointing out that human beings had actually decided to do something before they were conscious of making that decision. I mean, they could tell that signals were being sent to their arms before they knew that they were true. And my less valiant has an architecture for the brain and more recently Christus Papadimitrio in the Academy science proceedings a year ago with two other people, but I know Christos very well. And he's got this model of this architecture by which you could create things that correlate well with experiments that are done on consciousness and any.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe consciousness will be understood someday, but the last time I checked, it was still 200 years away. I haven't been specializing in this by any means, but I went to lectures about it 20 years ago when I was a symposium at the American Academy in Cambridge. And it started out by saying essentially everything that's been written about consciousness is hogwash.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't consider it important. Let's put it that way because it's in the category of things that it would be nice to know, but I think it's beyond knowledge. And so I don't. I'm more interested in knowing about the Riemann hypothesis or something.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I know we're I know where Pendros is coming from. I'm sure he has no, he might have even thought he proved it.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have good intuition. I mean, that's also possible, you know, that an AI created the universe. Intelligent design is Has all been done by an AI. This is, I mean, all of these things are, but you're asking me to pronounce on it, and I don't have any expertise. I'm a teacher that passes on knowledge, but I don't know. The fact that I vote yes or no on.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyway, there are lots of things that are beyond that. That we can speculate about, but I don't want somebody to say, Oh, yeah, canoe said this. And so he's smart. So that must be, I mean, I say it's something that we'll never know.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In many cases, decision is not made in advance. So instead, you design in order to be flexible to change with the way the wind is blowing.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have written thesis about how you can, how late binding will improve the, I mean, just-in-time manufacturing or whatever, you can defer a decision instead of doing your advanced planning and say, I'm going to allocate 30% to this and 50%. So in all kinds of”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm glad that it applied generally, but it was only my good luck. I said it, but I said it in a limited context, and I'm glad if it makes people think about stuff because it applies in another sense too, that is sometimes I will Do optimization in a way that does help the actual running time, but makes the program impossible to change next week because I've changed my data structure or something that made it less adaptable. So one of the great principles of computer science is laziness or whatever you call it, late binding. Hold off decisions when you can. And we understand now. Quantitatively, how valuable that is.”
2021-09-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #219 – Donald Knuth: Programming, Algorithms, Hard Problems & the Game of Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source