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07 May ' 04:40
- Tuesday, May 21, 10:00 am in Informatik Building SCP3, room HS1, Johannes Kepler University (Linz)
- Tuesday, May 21, 11:30 am in Informatik Building SCP3, room HS1, Johannes Kepler University (Linz)
- “All Questions Answered”
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04 May ' 12:53
- Tuesday, May 21, 10:00 am in Informatik Gebäude SCP3, room HS1, Johannes Kepler University (Linz)
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02 May ' 08:53
, last updated 30 April 2013. As usual, rewards will be given to whoever is first to find and report errors or to make valuable suggestions. I'm particularly interested in receiving feedback about the exercises (of which there are 99) and their answers (of which there are 99).
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09 Apr ' 23:33
- Tuesday, May 21, 10:00 am in Informatik Gebäude SCP3, Johannes Kepler University (Linz)
- speaking informally about my experiences with SAT solving
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14 Mar ' 20:41
current draft of pre-fascicle 5a (39 pages), last updated 07 March 2013. As usual, rewards will be given to whoever is first to find and report errors or to make valuable suggestions. I'm particularly interested in receiving feedback about the exercises (of which there are 99) and their answers (of which there are 99).
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14 Mar ' 07:58
- Thursday, May 16, 5:30 pm in lecture hall EI 7 (Gußhausstraße 27--29, 1040 Vienna)
- presenting the first annual “Vienna Gödel Lecture” of the Faculty of Informatics at Vienna University of Technology
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08 Mar ' 12:39
, last updated 31 January 2013. As usual, rewards will be given to whoever is first to find and report errors or to make valuable suggestions. I'm particularly interested in receiving feedback about the exercises (of which there are 99) and their answers (of which there are 99).
I worked particularly hard while preparing some of those exercises, attempting to improve on expositions that I found in the literature; and in several noteworthy cases, nobody has yet pointed out any errors. It would be nice to believe that I actually got the details right in my first attempt; but that seems unlikely, because I had hundreds of chances to make mistakes. So I fear that the most probable hypothesis is that nobody has been sufficiently motivated to check these things out as yet.
I still cling to a belief that these details are extremely instructive, and I'm uncomfortable with the prospect of printing a hardcopy edition with so many exercises unvetted. Thus I would like to enter here a plea for some readers to tell me explicitly, ``Dear Don, I have read exercise N and its answer very carefully, and I believe that it is 100% correct,'' where N is one of the following exercises in prefascicle 5a:
- 19 (mean, variance, and independence of infinitely many binary variables)
- 24 (median of the cumulative binomial distribution)
- 28 (Hoeffding's theory of generalized cumulative binomial distributions)
- 29 (the nearly forgotten inequality of Samuels)
- 59 (the four functions theorem)
- 61 (the FKG inequality)
- 99 (Motwani and Raghavan's generalized bound on random loop termination time)
Remember that you don't have to work the exercise first; you're allowed and even encouraged to peek at the answer. Please send success reports to the usual address for bug reports (taocp@cs.stanford.edu), if you have time to provide this extra help. Thanks in advance!
New Updates to Computers & Typesetting
Spiffy new printings of the hardcover versions of The TeXbook, TeX: The Program, and The METAFONTbook came out last year, and I'm delighted to announce that the other two volumes are also now available---produced for the first time entirely with modern technology! Hurray! For me this represents the grand culmination of my decades of work on typography. Now is a perfect time to replace any old copies that have become dog-eared after years of (ab)use.
The five volumes of this series are called Volumes A, B, C, D, and E, although they also have individual names. Thus, the definitive versions of Volumes A, B, C appeared in 2012, and they now are joined by the new and improved Volumes D and E.
Volume D, METAFONT: The Program, contains the complete text of one of the three most interesting programs that I ever wrote (the other two being TeX and MMIX-PIPE). METAFONT includes numerous subalgorithms of independent interest with respect to rendering curves, manipulating splines, solving linear equations dynamically, processing “object-oriented macros,” etc.
Volume E, Computer Modern Typefaces, is a “coffee-table book,” which defines exactly how every letter and every symbol that appears in any of my books (including this one) are drawn electronically by simulated pens. Each character is illustrated at large scale on the left-hand pages, with labeled control points, and accompanied by METAFONT code to its right.
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26 Feb ' 14:55
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23 Feb ' 20:23
Help needed from Emacs hackers
Long ago I defined a CWEB mode, based on TeX mode, and it has worked fine until recently (when somebody changed TeX mode). Nowdays it still works well except when I use a percent sign as a formatting character in a string for printf or scanf, etc. The percent sign now is considered to be a comment character; which of course is the correct behavior for TeX mode. My problem arises because CWEB programs alternate between snippets of TeX text and snippets of C or C++; the resulting behavior within C code makes it look as if my parentheses and braces aren't properly nested.
What I want is a hook that I can add to TeX mode; this hook should parse % as an ordinary character when it appears "inside string quotes". For simplicity, the quoted material can be assumed to be all on the same line.
My workaround at present is to use \x25 instead of % within format strings. I can go back to ordinary percent signs when weaving the file. But I'd be happier if I didn't have to use this kludge.
If you have time to look into this, please check out cweb.el in the CWEB sources.
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31 Jan ' 23:18
, last updated 31 January 2013. As usual, rewards will be given to whoever is first to find and report errors or to make valuable suggestions. I'm particularly interested in receiving feedback about the exercises (of which there are 96) and their answers (of which there are 96).
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