Donald Knuth Quotes

Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does.

Type a few lines of code, you create an organism.

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

Algorithm

I grew up as a computer scientist, and I've always been fascinated by algorithms.

Programming is how we talk to the machines that are increasingly woven into our lives. If you aren't a programmer, you're like one of the unlettered people of the Middle Ages who were told what to think by the literate priesthood. We had a Renaissance when more people could read and write; we'll have another one when everyone programs.

After all, if you had the complete decision process, you could run it as an AI, and I'd be coding it up right now.

Formula creation is magnitudes harder for computer algorithms than actually executing within a formula. But once the genre is created and the formula is known, then the computer can do the repetitive task of executing within the genre.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Computers, like automobiles and airplanes, do only what people tell them to do.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

As the border between physical and digital gets more permeable, a new kind of literacy emerges. And that literacy is built on a foundation of code - whether it's the codes of letters and words, or the code of bits and algorithms.

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.

We're having the first computer-generated comic strip in the United States.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

I just write mechanical things.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.