Knuth: "Shock! Shock!" (AI coding)

[ergophobe]

(it was too click baity without the parentheses, but that is how the great Knuth starts his article)

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6— Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic ad

I love that the final sentence of this very academic paper is: "May the Force be with you."

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

If you don't know, Knuth is the author of The Art of Computer Programming (vol 1-3 were out when I was an undergrad and there are a few more volumes now) and is generally on the shortlist of greatest computer scientists in history. He is 88 years old