{"id":831,"date":"2005-02-07T10:25:41","date_gmt":"2005-02-07T17:25:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=831"},"modified":"2005-02-07T10:25:41","modified_gmt":"2005-02-07T17:25:41","slug":"the-knuth-is-we-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/02\/07\/the-knuth-is-we-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"The Knuth Is We Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve ever been fascinated by how people approach solving problems, these notes from a &#8220;Programming and Problem Solving Seminar&#8221; taught by Donald Knuth at Stanford are an extremely interesting read.  Knuth selected five (unsolved) problems for the class to work on (with an eye for problems that would lead to interesting subproblems) over the course of the semester.  The problems are extremely interesting in their own right, but reading the way in which people attacked the problems is actually much more interesting.  One gets the impression, sometimes, that  theory is about solved problems, but actually it&#8217;s more about a lot of failures.  Well, maybe this is my own predjudice due to the number of times I&#8217;ve failed, but I suspect I&#8217;m not the only one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve ever been fascinated by how people approach solving problems, these notes from a &#8220;Programming and Problem Solving Seminar&#8221; taught by Donald Knuth at Stanford are an extremely interesting read. Knuth selected five (unsolved) problems for the class to work on (with an eye for problems that would lead to interesting subproblems) over the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2005\/02\/07\/the-knuth-is-we-fail\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Knuth Is We Fail&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}