A REASON FOR RENUNCIATION

    Possessions leave us at the end,
      However long they stay;
    Then why not cast aside, my friend,
      What leaves us anyway?

    And if they leave against our will,
      The heart takes time in mending;
    If given willingly, they fill
      That heart with joy unending.

So at the time my conclusion had been that there was no mistake (interpreting the "repeat" as a loop), but it's arguable… maybe if the person who posted the question had asked Knuth instead, he'd have had a reward check?

For anyone else reading this: make sure you click on the "controls & metrics" at the bottom to try out all the options (such as comparing with your browser's "text-wrap: pretty"); it's really cool!

But obviously multiplying two n-bit binary numbers is not done in O(1) time, so "only counting the number of multiplies" is not a meaningful model, and not the model adopted by the researchers quoted in the article.

Wish this project great success!

(From https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...)

In particular writing like this is just annoying:

> Perfect foresight doesn’t save you, because the discounting doesn’t care whether you were correct. It cares that you sequenced the cost ahead of the return. The gap between the two is the loss, and you opened the gap on purpose.

(Bruce Edgar), who was (on (102 not out)), was stuck at (the (non-striker's end)) the entire (over).

• An “over” consists of six opportunities to hit the ball and score “runs”. (A “run” is the basic unit of scoring.)

• "102 not out" indicates how many runs the player had personally contributed to the team's score. The number is large enough to suggest that this was the player who was playing particularly well in that match.

So the sentence is saying that the player who could be expected to make good use of whichever of those six opportunities he got, did not get any of them.

I think as with most cases of unfamiliar jargon, the sentence can be confusing not because of unusual words but because of everyday words being used with technical meanings ("not out", "end", "over").

• The Wikipedia page from before the reference to Chen's article was added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng... — it cites two sources for "coded by Tony Krueger" ("About box from the game") and for "written [by Krueger] in a single summer" (a forum post).

• Chen's article mentions "Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported…", then adds a footnote: “Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.”

• The Wikipedia article then cites Chen's article for this additional information.

It's all fine and proper. I've just edited the citation to make this clear again.

Also for anyone else reading this, Frank Liang's thesis "Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er" (https://tug.org/docs/liang/) is a great read, and the data structure it uses (packed tries) is clever too. The section of the TeX program that describes hyphenation is also an interesting read, and Knuth added a further twist (what we may call a hash-packed trie) in his frequent-words literate program for Bentley's column.

So whether “only 17%” is interesting or not depends on whether you see it as a stand-in for “less than half”, or “a number close to 0”.

(Posting this comment mainly to correct an error in my previous comment: in both places that I wrote “n=2^64” I should have instead written “n=2^32”.)