The biggest shame of my life is that I had one of these and somehow managed to lose it.

The error was saying that "infinitely many alphabets can be generated" but there is a finite number of parameters which have a finite range of values. If Knuth had just written "a humongous number of alphabets" he would be correct.

It's not a reward check, but Knuth read one of my articles and emailed me about it [0], which I found pretty cool.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-3/tb135chernoff-lwc.pdf

It was a bit more than 25 years ago for me, check #790 for $2.88 DT 33, (143).

Really need to find another error or point of improvement so as to get the digital account --- I've been reading through TAoCP Vol. 4 Fascicle 7 on _Constraint Satisfaction_, but it's been slow going (though I did find out that it is intentional that he not list beginning of chapter quotes in the index).

I wondered how you received a real check since Knuth has not been sending out real checks (as you have noted) for some time now, only to see that you explained it in the very first sentence and I had read over it, just like many people read over the error that you found in the first sentence of the book. Nice one! I wonder what the "Infinitely" was replaced with - probably not "Finitely" :)

I had received a check recently and wrote about it too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286258

What a brilliant teaching technique, think of how many people studied his work for bounties that they would never cash.

I'm surprised we haven't heard of anyone running an AI on Donald Knuth's books to generate the largest collection of checks in existence...

Awesome! I know the feeling, I have two myself. https://x.com/loginn/status/1367475093719416833

(Hmm maybe I should also write a blogpost about this)

Interesting how no other writers in the field seem to have adopted Knuths' strategy to get their books proofread to the point of being bullet proof.

Sadly I think this is the end of an era. Someone should probably run an AI fact checker on this and send him the rest of any errors. Or he could change the nature or requirement of the reward, if somehow it can be proved the error could not have been found without a human's effort.

I know a guy (ricbit) who have 4 or more

I wonder if someone has used an LLM yet to analyze Knuth’s books and find errors to inundate him with? Please don’t do that (although I’m sure it’s possible).

But what's the most Reward checks anyone has ever held?

Heh, and I thought I was being pedantic with my reward cheque. In my case I found inconsistent hyphenation in a technical term used in the book. I had wondered how to hyphenate it in my own writing so turned to Knuth to see what he did and was surprised to find it inconsistent even within a single volume of TAOCP! He wrote back with a funny message and a cheque for the back of San Serrif. It's on my wall now.

Just FYI for HN - if there is anyone looking to make big money in the coming years there are no fully signed TAOCP first editions anywhere. You would honestly print so much money if you could get all the first edition volumes signed.

Images weren't loading for me, here's a Wayback Machine link https://web.archive.org/web/20260412143311/https://www.thoma...

Can we adjust the URL to have a final trailing slash? The HN URL points to,

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check

But this means the images, whose hrefs are like,

  src="./bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg"

Don't load; that relative-ref results in a URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg

Which is a 404.

One can infer that the post's URI is like a "directory" of the subresources for the post, including those images; the URL of

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/

(n.b. the trailing slash) adjusts the resolution of the image's relative-ref now to:

  https://www.thomas-huehn.com/knuth-reward-check/bug-report-knuth-2006.jpg

And the images load. Yes, trailing slashes in URLs are significant in the case of resolving a relative ref like that.

If the author is here, you might consider redirecting the non-slash to the slash.

> But why will you find me there with the entry “0x$1.20”, i.e. decimal $2.88?

I know Knuth has his own notation here, (it is clearly noted at the bottom of the BOSS page) but 0x1.20 should really be decimal 1.125.

[flagged]

i was expecting an article about farming these with claude.

thank god it wasn't that lol

True AGI will arrive when an LLM will be able to provide ALL remaining mistakes in Donald Knuth's books. And kill one more amazing thing in the process.