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Ask HN: Is it worth reading The Art of Computer Programming now?

1 points by weavie ↗ HN
Just interested in peoples thoughts. It's been a long term ambition of mine. But now I'm now wondering if it will just be a waste of time.

I will probably never really need an in depth understanding of algorithms given I can just prompt "make this efficient". But if you don't understand them, how do you know the LLM is doing the best it can?

4 comments

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kypro
"Worth" in a relative or absolute sense?

I guess it still has some value, but obviously no one will be paying you for your ability to optimise a sorting algorithm now.

hackermailman
You compare algorithms in TAOCP to see which one is better for a certain problem that's the core of the book really and how Knuth himself describes them. With AI you can make your own custom simulator or VM to run the programs from the book.

Then you get to explore all the different possible representations of these things because you can pick a new way to represent a graph that still follows all the math properties but is totally different than the usual representation.