Knuth reward check
thomas-huehn.com109 points by Curiositry 6 hours ago
109 points by Curiositry 6 hours ago
The biggest shame of my life is that I had one of these and somehow managed to lose it.
If that's your biggest shame then you must have lived a good life.
Or perhaps a life not lived
This comment may trigger life changing reflection in hundreds or thousands of souls...
I guess only if you value shame? Which is not a given. HN has so many “shameless plug” comments - HN readers for sure qualify as shameless.
The error was saying that "infinitely many alphabets can be generated" but there is a finite number of parameters which have a finite range of values. If Knuth had just written "a humongous number of alphabets" he would be correct.
If I am reading this right, you can generate 268 435 456 ^ 62 alphabets.
I would say he could have even gotten away with “functionally infinite number of alphabets”.
Some of the parameters are bools. So somewhere between 2^62 and your figure...
Sadly I think this is the end of an era. Someone should probably run an AI fact checker on this and send him the rest of any errors. Or he could change the nature or requirement of the reward, if somehow it can be proved the error could not have been found without a human's effort.
It was a bit more than 25 years ago for me, check #790 for $2.88 DT 33, (143).
Really need to find another error or point of improvement so as to get the digital account --- I've been reading through TAoCP Vol. 4 Fascicle 7 on _Constraint Satisfaction_, but it's been slow going (though I did find out that it is intentional that he not list beginning of chapter quotes in the index).
Just FYI for HN - if there is anyone looking to make big money in the coming years there are no fully signed TAOCP first editions anywhere. You would honestly print so much money if you could get all the first edition volumes signed.
What a brilliant teaching technique, think of how many people studied his work for bounties that they would never cash.
I’m on the mailing list where errors related to TeX are submitted and the level of scrutiny behind submissions is truly mind-boggling.
I'm surprised we haven't heard of anyone running an AI on Donald Knuth's books to generate the largest collection of checks in existence...
He is quite methodical and meticulous --- I doubt that there is much in the training data which isn't already accounted for in his research for his writings.
I only managed to get one check (for an error and a point of improvement) for _very_ minor points in _Digital Typography_ which was facilitated by my having been fascinated by typography since reading Oscar Ogg's _The 26 Letters_ and his cousin Warren Chappell's _The Living Alphabet_ when I was 8 or so.
The next headline will read: "AI pilled vibecoders bankrupt a once prominent computer scientist, the figure will surprise you!"
Awesome! I know the feeling, I have two myself. https://x.com/loginn/status/1367475093719416833
(Hmm maybe I should also write a blogpost about this)
I also got one for catching DEK out for claiming "Alan Turing broke the Enigma".
That claim goes to the Polish cryptoanalyst Marian Rejewski instead, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski); what Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers did was automate the breaking, which was important because it had to be done again every day (due to the many combinations of configurations of the Enigma).
Interesting how no other writers in the field seem to have adopted Knuths' strategy to get their books proofread to the point of being bullet proof.
No other writers have the stature of Knuth. The motivation to proof-read here is not the monetary reward after all.
I know a guy (ricbit) who have 4 or more
But what's the most Reward checks anyone has ever held?
Is that necessarily accurate?
> "These account balances reflect only the rewards for errors reported since the beginning of 2006. Many reward checks were issued during 1968--2005, too numerous to mention here."
There's 20 years on that chart vs 37 not on it.
Also that's "account balance" rather than "the most Reward checks" which I take to mean "the most [number of] reward checks" -- there's probably a correlation, yes, but [0] shows a variety of ways where check values are non-constant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check#Reward_amou...
There is only one person that can rule that out, but since this is their statement on the subject I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.
You probably have a substantial subset of the people on that list on HN, so it might be possible to recover a chunk of the 'paper era'.
I received two checks in the very early 2000s and my name isn’t on this list.
For the record I cashed both and have zero regrets. At the time it definitely felt like the right thing to do as I am not into collecting tokens.
> I would take it as authoritative unless there is a better source.
I'm not doubting the authority on the balances; it's the correlation to the number of checks I'm querying - high balance doesn't necessarily mean high number of checks, especially since the checks can have different values.
Although that omits the paper check era.
My guess for the top slot off the top of my head was actually #4.
i was expecting an article about farming these with claude.
thank god it wasn't that lol
Images weren't loading for me, here's a Wayback Machine link https://web.archive.org/web/20260412143311/https://www.thoma...
The HN URL is missing the trailing slash; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50036221
Can we adjust the URL to have a final trailing slash? The HN URL points to,
https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check
src="./bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg"
https://www.thomas-huehn.com/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
One can infer that the post's URI is like a "directory" of the subresources for the post, including those images; the URL of
https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/
https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg
If the author is here, you might consider redirecting the non-slash to the slash.
> But why will you find me there with the entry “0x$1.20”, i.e. decimal $2.88?
I know Knuth has his own notation here, (it is clearly noted at the bottom of the BOSS page) but 0x1.20 should really be decimal 1.125.
[flagged]
True AGI will arrive when an LLM will be able to provide ALL remaining mistakes in Donald Knuth's books. And kill one more amazing thing in the process.