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高老头出现了……

上个星期 Knuth 又出来讲 Computer Musing 了……高老头精神很好，幽默风格不减，现场笑声不断。记两小段：

… that’s when I first heard BDDs (Binary Decision Diagram), and I said, oh boy, I got put that into volume four of The Art of Computer Programming. Well, I started writing this part a year ago in May, so that’s more than twelve months, more than a year ago then you see. And, every other section of The Art of Computer Programming, well, I used to polish off a section in six weeks. Now, er… you know I am getting older and computer science is getting harder (laughter), so it’s taking longer now but I had no idea that I was gonna spend a whole year on it. But the more I looked into it, it was just… er… I couldn’t put it down. There’s so much stuff that needed to be in my book. … When people talk about combinatorial explosion which usually means the size of the problem is getting big; to me, combinatorial explosion means the size of volume four is getting big (laughter). I mean, there’s just so much stuff that has to be said about, even when I am sticking to what i considered the basics …

高老头提到他希望引用 Wikipedia 里面的一段话：In popular usage, the term BDD almost always refers to Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (ROBDD in the literature, used when the ordering and reduction aspects need to be emphasized).

… when I wanted to get permission to get quote from the Wikipedia, and they have been working all the laws for the other way around for when Wikipedia is quoting from me (laughter). But, anyway they said it was O.K. for me to quote the Wikipedia even though my book is not issued with the GPL.

高老头提到他幽默感时曾说：I don’t take everything too seriously. 对以上两段，也请勿 take too seriously…

Tags: knuth