Selected papers on fun and games
by Donald Knuth · first published 2010
8mentions
3recommended by
5HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
60% recommend40% neutral
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…much of TAOCP, Concrete Mathematics (a book filled to the brim with the kind of delightful discovery of pattern that Lockhart describes as optimal in learning math), Knuth's marvelously playful book "Selected Papers on Fun and Games"[2], and the novel he wrote about Conway's astonishing "Surreal Numbers"[3]...listening to him lecture on "importunate permutation" at the last local (SF) Joint Meeting of the American Mathematical Association,…
on “A Mathematician’s Lament (2002) [pdf] ” ↗…fire-hose of various computer science topics. But the series of books that are simply "collected papers" makes it easy to focus on something much narrower. For impractical, you may want to start from Selected Papers on Fun and Games. And then he has books like Surreal Numbers, which is written as a story of a couple discovering mathematical notation and deriving a whole system...
on “Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?” ↗…one of the finest writers, and writing is clearly in Knuth's DNA — even among the many hats he has worn (mathematician, programmer, computer scientist, teacher), at heart of everything is writing. (His Selected Papers on Fun and Games includes some stuff he wrote in high school and college; even those show his spirit.) IMO, every page of his is a delight to read. I think the issue for those who find it otherwise may be that he writes…
on “Literate programming is much more than just commenting code” ↗…make it harder to spoil the puzzle, but you can find them online with a bit of effort — maybe this will help: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl... — and it's also reprinted in Selected Papers on Fun and Games.)
on “Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing” ↗See also: "Representing numbers using only one 4" written by a 26-year-old Donald Knuth in 1964 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2689238 reprinted as Chapter 10 of his Selected Papers on Fun and Games) — it uses the single digit 4, and the three operations √x (square root), ⌊x⌋ (floor, i.e. greater integer not greater than), and x! (factorial), and ends with a (still unsolved) conjecture about whether…
on “Making any integer with four 2s” ↗Both these links are broken on the article that is linked: "Chapter 22 of Selected Papers on Fun & Games. (See “Randomness in Music”.)"
on “Anecdotes from Donald Knuth and Robert Tarjan” ↗…like the code in the post simply guesses at random?) is described in: > The computer as Master Mind. Journal of Recreational Mathematics 9 (1976), pp. 1–6. Reprinted with an addendum as Chapter 25 of Selected Papers on Fun and Games. (https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/teaching/cs3530/resources/k... is the original paper, but the addendum in the 2011 book is 5 pages long, longer than the original article itself (not counting its figure/table),…
on “Mastermind Solver” ↗It is in the book "Selected papers on fun and games". But it is also available as a separate article "The Computer as Master Mind”. I was certain he wrote the article about MOO and/or bulls and cows, but it seems like I remember wrong.
on “How to solve the "Mastermind" guessing game? (2009)” ↗