Bill Menees's Blog

In 1998, I wrote an IDE called MIX Builder for developing and debugging programs on Donald Knuth's MIX computer as defined in his The Art of Computer Programming book series. Dr. Knuth is big into "perfectability", so he offers a $2.56 reward to the first person to find each error in his books.

While writing my MIX emulator, I was lucky enough to find two errors in TAOCP Volume 1, so I have two checks from Dr. Knuth for $2.56. The honor of having two rewards from Dr. Knuth is way cooler than having another $5.12 in my pocket, so I'd never cash his checks. Some have described Knuth's reward checks as "among computerdom's most prized trophies". I understand that completely, but it's hard to explain it to people that haven't tried to read TAOCP and don't know Dr. Knuth's background and major contributions to computer science.

Recently, I ran across an article about Knuth reward checks in Wikipedia. It has a list of known checks, so I added my two (#392 and #462) to the list. I also scanned in the letters that Dr. Knuth sent back with his annotations. He stopped using email on 1/1/1990, so he sent his responses along with the checks via snail mail.

• Scan of check and letter about the 1^st error I found.
• Scan of check and letter about the 2^nd error I found.

Labels: Software

# posted by Bill Menees @ 5:19 PM