"the following is a conversation with donald knuth his second time on this podcast don is a legendary computer scientist touring award winner father of algorithm analysis author of the art of computer ..."

"your first large-scale program you wrote it in ibm 650 assembler in the summer of 1957. i wrote it in decimal machine language i didn't know about assembler until a year later but the year 1957 the ye..."

"and it showed the picture from stanford uh that that you know they they said look you know we donated one of these to stanford one to mit and they mentioned one other another college and in in decembe..."

"computer center um and and uh wrote some manuals then but but yeah but but this was uh but this was the way we did it and and my first program then was june of 1957 the tic-tac-toe no that was the sec..."

"one card or maybe i could get seven instructions on the card eight instructions i don't know but anyway so i'm sitting there at the console of the machine i mean i'm doing this at night when nobody el..."

"um so you're sorry to interrupt you were so you're sitting there late at night yeah so it feels like you spent many years late at night working on a computer oh yeah so like what what's that like so m..."

"was down an awful lot because we they had they had many talented programmers changing the operating system every day and so operating system was getting better every day but it was also crashing so so..."

"three somewhere on the card i got to put a five somewhere on the card right and and you know what my i was my first program i i probably screwed up and you know it it fell off the edge of the card or ..."

"uh was a converted number from from binary to decimal or something like that it was much much simpler it didn't have that many bugs in it my third program was tic-tac-toe yeah and he had some machi so..."

"um uh and then uh but that would be 64 then you have to anyway i love how you're doing the calculation anyway the three comes from the fact that it's either empty an x or an o right and the 650 what w..."

"you know but if you if you win a game then you uh then you increase the value of that position for you but you decrease it for your opponent uh uh so but but i i i could i had that much total memory f..."

"and brain three so brain one just played a um let's see at random okay it's your turn okay you gotta put an x somewhere he has to go in an empty space but that's that's it okay choose to choose one an..."

"okay so so anyway i had brain one random you know uh knowing nothing brain two knowing everything then brain three was the learning one and and i could i i could play brain one against brain one brain..."

"was there um did you did a curiosity and interest in learning systems persist for you so why why did you want brain three to learn yeah i i think naturally it's we're talking about rod brooks like he ..."

"this a step for humankind right no no way when did you first start thinking about computation in the big sense you know like the universal turing machine well i mean i had to pass an ex i had to take ..."

"and get this i i mean it was like watching miracles happen you mentioned in in an interview that when reading a program you can tell when the author of the program changed oh okay uh how the heck can ..."

"and uh i have no idea which program was responsible for but but it you would get to a part where the guy would just not know how he how to move things between registers very efficiently and so and so ..."

"subset of c that i use okay but this that's a little bit stylistic yeah but but with literate programming you alternate between english and and c or whatever and um and by the way people listening to ..."

"readable by humans yes and especially by me yeah a week later or a year later that's a good test if you yourself understand the code yeah easily a week or more or a year later yeah so it it it's uh wh..."

"or not you know and one of the things was uh uh in in the uh in the comments to volume one uh uh the the major the major reader was was bob floyd uh who is my great uh co-worker in the 60s um died ear..."

"i mean i've got a joke in there so that one you really have to work for uh i i don't know if you've heard about this let me explain it maybe you'll find it interesting so open ai is a company that doe..."

"you find that kind of idea at all interesting every year we're going to be losing more and more control over what machines are doing and people are saying well it seemed to like when i was a professor..."

"side the positive side is the more you automate the more you let humans do what humans do best so maybe programming this you know maybe humans should focus on a small part of programming that requires..."

"serious way uh uh so if you're writing if you're writing code for geeky oh yeah here this is great this will make a slaughter bot okay so i see so you have to be very careful like right now it seems l..."

"signals from extraterrestrial they don't want anything to do with us oh because they because they they invented it too and so you you do have a little bit of worry on the existential threats of ai and..."

"amazing that it much works as does work it's it's incredibly amazing and actually that's the source of my optimism as well including for artificial intelligence so we we drive over bridges we we use a..."

"i tend to think that most people um have the desire and the capacity to be good to each other and love will ultimately win out like if they're given the opportunity that's where they lean in the art o..."

"english language in 1960 early 1960s that's what optimized me meant okay so people started doing cost optimization other kinds of things uh you know whole subfields of of algorithms and economics and ..."

"than twice as fast and you can only do that once you've completed the program and then you empirically study where i had some kind of profiling that i knew what was important yeah so you don't think t..."

"but so the reason that line resonated with a lot of people is because uh there's something about the programmer's mind that wants that enjoys optimization so it's a constant struggle to balance lazine..."

"the fact that i that i vote yes or no on well you do have expertise as a human not as a not as a teacher or a scholar of computer science i mean that's ultimately the realm of where the discussion of ..."

"don't i'm not i'm more interested in knowing about the riemann hypothesis or something so when you say it's an interesting statement beyond knowledge yeah i think what you mean is it's not sufficientl..."

"the american academy in in cambridge and it started out by saying essentially everything that's been written about consciousness is is hogwash i tend to i tend to disagree with that a little bit so we..."

"uh this model of uh this architecture by which you could uh create a uh things that that correlate well with the uh with experiments that are done on consciousness uh and and and and he he actually yo..."

"a story for you to uh a consistent story for you to believe and that makes it all nice yeah and so i prefer to talk about things that i have some expertise and then things for which i which i'm only a..."

"you got to check it out yeah can i ask about john conway yes in fact i i i'm just reading now the the issue of mathematical intelligence or that came in last last week it's a whole issue devoted to to..."

"since then uh and it was he was reported on something that he had done in high school uh you know almost ten years earlier [Music] before this conference but he never published it and and he climaxed ..."

"and i sent the right to my secretary to type it it was flowing as i was writing it uh faster than i could think almost but but but after i finished it uh and tried to write a letter to my secretary te..."

"with a napkin it started with an app connect but but but we would run into each other all that well yeah the next really impo i was giving lectures in montreal uh i i was giving a series of um of of s..."

"so you mentioned your wife jill you mentioned stable marriage can you tell the story of how you two met so we celebrated 60 years of wedded bliss uh last month and and we met because uh uh i was datin..."

"is there a secret you can uh you can say in terms of stable marriages of how you stayed together so long the topic stable marriage by the way is not it is is the technical term uh yes it's [Music] dif..."

"but if you if if you decide that it's that that there's going to be no frustration [Music] so you're going to have to compromise on your notions of beauty when you write christmas cards that's it uh y..."

"and he said you know if you want me to prove it you know here i'll turn to any page of this textbook and i'll tell you what's wrong with this page and and he did so and and the textbook had been writt..."

"to this day in a bunch of places where it's too easy for educational institutions to fall into credentialism versus uh inspirationalism i don't know if those are words but sort of uh yeah understandin..."

"that's a good line uh is there some interesting distinction between physics and math to you have you looked at physics much to like speak university feynman so the difference between the physics commu..."

"see the world in in uh in discrete ways and then this is more continuous yeah i i i'm not sure if turing would been a great physicist i think it was a pretty good chemist i don't know but but uh but a..."

"oh yeah okay and then uh xn multiplication is x to the n uh and then and then here the arrow is when you're doing the same kind of repetitive operation for the exponential so i so i put in one arrow a..."

"i talked to feynman about this and he said oh let's just let's just use double arrow but instead of taking integers let's consider complex numbers right so you know you have that means x to the x x bu..."

"the problem is uh something that everybody knows now if they're if they're using a search engine uh you have a a large collection of text and you want to know if if the word canoeist appears anywhere ..."

"and and jim morris noticed there was a more clever way to do it the obvious way would have started let's say you know we found that let letter m at character position one thousand so it was started ne..."

"i forget why i think vaughn was studying some technical problem about palindromes or something like that he wasn't really it juan wasn't working on on text searching but he was working on on an abstra..."

"so i thought this was a pretty you know cool theorem and so i tried it out on on a problem where i knew a stack automaton could do it but i couldn't figure out a fast way to do it on a regular compute..."

"and and it told me exactly what i should remember as i'm as i'm going through the string and i worked it out and and i wrote this little paper called automata theory can be useful and and the reason w..."

"each of us had discovered a different a different part of the elephant you know a different aspect of it and so we could put our our our things together it was my job to write the paper how did the el..."

"been involved with yeah okay well yeah that's i don't know how to answer questions like that but in this case uh it's pretty clear okay because it's uh called the the birth of the giant component okay..."

"pi they you're no no i was using pi to sort of saying pi is sort of random that nobody knows a pattern in exactly got it i got it but it's not yeah i i could have just as well drawn straws or somethin..."

"found something interesting happening the students are are generating this or simulating this random evolution of graphs and under taking stat snapshots every so often take a look at what the graph is..."

"that's that's it yeah you know i started looking at this to make it quantitative and uh basic problem was to slow down the big bang so that i could watch it happening yeah i i think i can explain it a..."

"11 edges and 10 vertices it's so it turns we call that a bicycle because it it it's got two loops and it's got to have two loops in it why can't it be trees just going off of the loop that i would nee..."

"was 2 0 and i and i looked at the denominator and i said wait a minute this number factors because 1001 is equal to 7 times 11 times 13. i had learned that in my first computer program so so so so 230..."

"so you know so that i could develop the uh the theory some more and understand what's happening in the big but uh because i could i could now write down explicit formulas for stuff right and so it wou..."

"open so i think that people should charge for non-trivial software but not for trivial software yeah you give an example of i think adobe photoshop versus on linux as photoshop has value which so it's..."

"the last stability i don't remember the number like 14 anyway it's it's quite and i'm going to get a new computer um i'm getting new um solid-state memory instead of kind of a hard disk and the basics..."

"dr seuss this is uh s-e-u-s-s he he wrote children's books in the 50s 40s and 50s wait are you talking about cat in the hat doctor yeah that's it yeah i like how you hit this on on beyond zebra did he..."

"by the way he he made a movie in the early 50s um i don't remember the name of the movie now you can probably find it on easily enough but it it features uh dozens and dozens of pianos all playing tog..."

"so so i wanted to use it as example in art of computer programming and i have i have exercise on how to design cool massive puzzles and uh you can find that on wikipedia certainly uh as an example m-a..."

"computer problem can you find a graceful way to label a graph so i started with a so i started with a graph that i use for an organic graph not not a mathematically symmetric graph or anything and i t..."

"um he sorry he did the algorithm or for this particular uh for the stick united states for the united states this problem is this problem is incredibly hard i mean for the general generally okay but i..."

"somehow often hidden uh in the middle of like the the most difficult problems can i ask you about uh productivity productivity yeah you said that quote my scheduling principle is to do the thing i hat..."

"the time i'm writing the book i i'm you know that it's upbeat i i i can have humor i can you know i can i can say this is cool you know wow this uh i have to i have to disguise the fact that it was pa..."

"in it yeah that's a that's a really really good point you know sometimes it's more difficult than others to do this but i mean during the covet lots of days when i did when i never saw another human b..."

"it's only for me and but i but i personally think of my belief that that god exists although i have no idea what that means but i believe that there is some something beyond human uh capabilities um a..."

"clue a fun one yeah i mean it's as so many people have said it's the journey not the destination and people live live through crises help each other all these things come up history repeats itself you..."