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But it it's not 100% accurate and currently focuses on birds from Canada, the US, and Europe.
I have received one actual email from him, when I pointed out an error in the balances at the Bank of San Serriffe (https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html).
The email looks like it was typed by him - the style is right and it is signed "Don" - but the From: address has someone else's name.
For example, in Volume 4A there's a simple technique for comparing two pointers in bit-reversed form. This technique was patented by Hewlett-Packard as a method of randomizing search trees (treaps):
https://bugfix-66.com/fdb8bb4fa84cf810aa25ff40c88a13c1874410...
From Volume 3, here is by far the fastest method of sorting integers (Singleton's method), an algorithm I have used professionally several times (e.g., for beam search in a speech decoder):
https://bugfix-66.com/834f0677c85b23c0bf1047d3654ab7c27ff054...
Knuth's books are just packed with gems like that.
The meticulous high quality of the books is also remarkable. However, if you look very carefully you can find rare mistakes. I received payment from Knuth and have an account at his bank:
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/boss.html
Getting your name on the above list was once a Hacker rite of passage.
When Google bought the Dejanews archives I thought it was good, because Google was good at search and I naively still believed that the company actually wanted to make all information accessible. It's a real shame that all of the old Usenet stuff is gone.
Tho not in the best way, I feel, but at least this is opt-in?
Am I reading that right? A tower 242 meters tall (read: a 70-floor skyscraper), with moving 118 meter blades, and they're proposing anchoring it to a floating base!?
I'm a subscriber so I don't know how soft the paywall is:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/07/21/...
But I'm confused by the example showing the buggy version of the algorithm fail. This is in the section "Finding the Wrong Path".
Consider the state of the algorithm after the first step. We've explored S and added its neighbors to the queue, Q = [T, a1, b1].
In the next step we explore T, the first node in the queue. We add its neighbors , a3 and b2, to the queue.
Now, I would expect the new value of Q to be something like [a1, b1, a3, b2] (depending on the order we add T's neighbors). In this case we would process a1, and b1 next, notice that b1 is adjacent to b2, and correctly find the shortest path S-b1-b2-T.
But the animation actually shows that after step 2, Q = [a1, a3, b1, b3]. In other words, a3 didn't join the back of the queue but jumped in front of b1. This is what leads to the buggy behavior that is shown.
So as I understand the example, this would have worked fine if Q were actually a queue. But as shown it is not.
Why is this?