{"id":303,"date":"2008-01-10T06:44:13","date_gmt":"2008-01-10T10:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=303"},"modified":"2008-01-10T06:44:13","modified_gmt":"2008-01-10T10:44:13","slug":"volume-4-is-already-written-in-our-hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Volume 4 is already written (in our hearts)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the 70th birthday of Donald E. Knuth: Priest of Programming, Titan of Typesetting, Monarch of MMIX<\/a>, intellectual heir to Turing and von Neumann, greatest living computer scientist by almost-universal assent … alright, you get the idea.<\/p>\n

That being the case, Jeff Shallit proposed to various CS bloggers that we should all band together and present the master with a birthday surprise<\/a>: one post each about how his work has inspired us. The posts are now in! Readers who don’t know about Knuth’s work (are there any?) should start with this<\/a> post from Luca. Then see this<\/a> from David Eppstein, this<\/a> from Doron Zeilberger, this<\/a> from Jeff, this<\/a> from Bill Gasarch, and this<\/a> from Suresh.<\/p>\n

Knuth’s impact on my own work and thinking, while vast, has not been directly through research: his main influence on my BibTeX file is that if not for him, I wouldn’t have<\/em> a BibTeX file. (One reason is that I’m one of the people Doron Zeilberger attacks for ignoring constant factors, and supporting what he calls “the ruling paradigm in computational complexity theory, with its POL vs. EXP dichotomy.”) So I decided to leave Knuth’s scientific oeuvre to others, and to concentrate in this post on his contributions to two other fields: mathematical exposition and computational theology.<\/p>\n

Knuth’s creation of the TeX<\/a> typesetting system — his original motivation being to perfect the layout of his own Art of Computer Programming<\/em><\/a> books — was remarkable in two ways. First, because scientific typesetting is of so little interest to industry, it’s not clear if something like TeX would ever<\/em> have been invented if not for one man and his borderline-neurotic perfectionism. Second, TeX is one of the only instances I can think of when a complicated software problem was solved so well that it never had to be solved again (nor will it for many decades, one hazards to guess). At least in math, computer science, and physics, the adoption of TeX has been so universal that failure to use it is now a reliable crackpot indicator<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n

Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches \u03c0. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592; it was last updated in December 2002 … Even though Donald Knuth himself has suggested a few areas in which TeX could have been improved, he indicated that he firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features. For this reason, he has stated that the \u201cabsolutely final change (to be made after my death)\u201d will be to change the version number to \u03c0, at which point all remaining bugs will become features.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Knuth’s interest in scientific exposition goes far beyond typesetting. His 1974 Surreal Numbers: How Two Ex-Students Turned on to Pure Mathematics and Found Total Happiness<\/a><\/em>, which he wrote in one week, was weirdness at the highest possible level: the Beatles’ White Album of math. It’s said to represent the only occasion in history when a new mathematical theory (Conway’s theory of surreal numbers) was introduced in the form of a novel. (Though admittedly, with the exception of one sex scene, this is a “novel” whose plot development mostly takes the form of lemmas.)<\/p>\n

Those seeking to improve their own writing should consult Mathematical Writing<\/em><\/a> (available for free on the web), the lecture notes from a course at Stanford taught by Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul Roberts. Like a lot of Knuth’s work, Mathematical Writing<\/em> has the refreshing feel of an open-ended conversation: we get to see Knuth interact with students, other teachers, and visiting luminaries like Mary-Claire van Leunen, Paul Halmos, Jeff Ullman, and Leslie Lamport.<\/p>\n

Since I’ve blogged before about the battle over academic publishing<\/a>, I also wanted to mention Knuth’s remarkable and characteristically methodical 2003 letter<\/a> to the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms<\/em>. Knuth asks in a postscript that his letter not be distributed widely — but not surprisingly, it already has been.<\/p>\n

In the rest of this post, I’d like to talk about Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About<\/em><\/a>, the only book of Knuth’s for which I collected one of his coveted $2.56 prizes for spotting an error. (Nothing important, just a typo.)<\/p>\n

Things<\/em> is based on a series of lectures on computer science and religion that Knuth gave in 1997 at MIT. (At the risk of oversimplifying: Knuth practices Christianity, but in a strange form less interested in guns and gays than in some business about “universal compassion.”) Perhaps like most readers, when I bought Things<\/em> I expected yet another essay on “non-overlapping magisteria,” a famous scientist’s apologia justifying his belief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. But Knuth likes to surprise, and what he delivers instead is mostly a meditation on the typography of Bible verses<\/em> [sic]. More precisely, Things<\/em> is a “metabook”: a book about the lessons Knuth learned while writing and typesetting an earlier book<\/a>, one I haven’t yet read, that analyzed verse 3:16 of every book of the Bible.<\/p>\n

But this being a lecture series, Knuth also fields questions from the audience about everything from sin and redemption to mathematical Platonism. He has a habit of parrying all the really<\/em> difficult questions with humor; indeed, he does this so often one comes to suspect humor is<\/em> his answer. As far as I could tell, there’s only one passage in the entire book where Knuth directly addresses what atheists are probably waiting for him to address. From one of the question periods:<\/p>\n

Q: How did you become so interested in God and religion in the first place?<\/p>\n

A: It was because of the family I was born into. If I had been born in other circumstances, my religious life would no doubt have been quite different. (p. 155)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then on to the next question.<\/p>\n

To me, what’s remarkable about this response is that Knuth without any hesitation<\/em> concedes what skeptics from Xenophanes to Richard Dawkins have held up as the central embarrassment of religion. This, of course, is the near-perfect correlation between the content of religious belief and the upbringing of the believer. How, Dawkins is fond of asking, could there possibly be such a thing as a Christian or Hindu or Jewish child? How could a four-year-old already know <\/em>what he or she thinks about profound questions of cosmogony, history, and ethics — unless, of course, the child were brainwashed by parents or teachers?<\/p>\n

My Bayesian friends, like Robin Hanson<\/a>, carry this argument a step further. For them, the very fact that Knuth knows his beliefs would be different were he born to different parents<\/em> must, assuming he’s rational, force him to change his beliefs. For how can he believe something with any conviction, if he knows<\/em> his belief was largely determined by a logically-irrelevant coin toss?<\/p>\n

And yet, openly defying the armies of Bayes arrayed against him, here we have Knuth saying, in effect: yes, if I know that if I were some other person my beliefs would be different, but I’m not<\/em> that other person; I’m Knuth.<\/p>\n

So, readers: is Knuth’s response a cop-out, the understandable yet ultimately-indefensible defense of an otherwise-great scientist who never managed to free himself from certain childhood myths? Or is it a profound acknowledgment that none of us ever<\/em> escape the circumstances of our birth, that we might as well own up to it, that tolerance ought not to require a shared prior, that the pursuit of science and other universal values can coexist with the personal and incommunicable?<\/p>\n

Taking a cue from Knuth himself, I’m going to dodge this question. Instead, I decided to end this post by quoting some of my favorite passages from Chapter 6 of Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About<\/em>.<\/p>\n

On computer science and God:<\/strong> “When I talk about computer science as a possible basis for insights about God, of course I’m not thinking about God as a super-smart intellect surrounded by large clusters of ultrafast Linux workstations and great search engines. That’s the user’s point of view.” (p. 168)<\/p>\n

“I think it’s fair to say that many of today’s large computer programs rank among the most complex intellectual achievements of all time. They’re absolutely trivial by comparison with any of the works of God, but still they’re somehow closer to those works than anything else we know.” (p. 169)<\/p>\n

On infinity:<\/strong> “Infinity is a red herring. I would be perfectly happy to give up immortality if I could only live Super K years before dying [‘Super K’ being defined similarly to an Ackermann number]. In fact, Super K nanoseconds would be enough.” (p. 172)<\/p>\n

On the other hand:<\/strong> “I once thought, if I ever had to preach a sermon in church, I would try to explain Cantor’s theorem to my non-mathematical friends so that they could understand something about the infinite.” (p. 172)<\/p>\n

On God and computational complexity:<\/strong> “I think it’s fair to say that God may well be bound by the laws of computational complexity … But I don’t recommend that theologians undertake a deep study of computational complexity (unless, of course, they really enjoy it). ” (p. 174)<\/p>\n

On quantum mechanics:<\/strong> “Several years ago, I chanced to open Paul Dirac’s famous book on the subject and I was surprised to find out that Dirac was not only an extremely good writer but also that his book was not totally impossible to understand. The biggest surprise, however — actually a shock — was to learn that the things he talks about in that book were completely different from anything I had ever read in Scientific American<\/em> or in any other popular account of the subject. Apparently when physicists talk to physicists, they talk about linear transformations of generalized Hilbert spaces over the complex numbers; observable quantities are eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of Hermitian linear operators. But when physicists talk to the general public they don’t dare mention such esoteric things, so they speak instead about particles and spins and such, which are much less than half the story. No wonder I could never really understand the popular articles.” (p. 181)<\/p>\n

“The extra detail that gets suppressed when quantum mechanics gets popularized amounts to the fact that, according to quantum mechanics, the universe actually consists of much more data than could ever be observed.” (p. 182)<\/p>\n

On free will and the problem of evil:<\/strong> “I can design a program that never crashes if I don’t give the user any options. And if I allow the user to choose from only a small number of options, limited to things that appear on a menu, I can be sure that nothing anomalous will happen, because each option can be foreseen in advance and its effects can be checked. But if I give the user the ability to write programs<\/em> that will combine with my own program, all hell might break loose. (In this sense the users of Emacs have much more free will than the users of Microsoft Word.) … I suppose we could even regard Figure 5 [a binary tree representing someone’s choices] as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” (p. 189-190)<\/p>\n

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