As a saddening commentary, Knuth stopped sending those checks in 2008 because of problems with check fraud. Since this refers to Knuth, I carefully parsed that not as "because of check fraud," but, "because of problems with check fraud." There is an interesting difference between those two.

From your wiki link:

  Initially, Knuth sent real, negotiable checks to recipients. He stopped doing
  so in October 2008 because of problems with check fraud. As a replacement, he
  started his own "Bank of San Serriffe", in the fictional nation of
  San Serriffe, which keeps an account for everyone who found an error since
  2006.[2] Knuth now sends out "hexadecimal certificates" instead of negotiable
  checks.

Essentially, he also created NFTs then...

I think Knuth also created news.ycombinator.com, google.com, and facebook.com. He refused all google stock, however, since they implemented map-reduce incorrectly, using a set of filters. In the case of fb, he was outfoxed, because he didn't have the documents to prove that he created all the algorithms for matching faces.

Is this real?

There is a wonderful alternate timeline where this is true!

> He refused all google stock, however, since they implemented map-reduce incorrectly, using a set of filters.

That was a reference to google filtering their presented results instead of being driven more by search results, as they advertise that they are.

> In the case of fb, he was outfoxed, because he didn't have the documents to prove that he created all the algorithms for matching faces.

That sentence was a nod to the accusations against Zuckerberg for stealing the original code for FB.

Of course, this was all presented in the context of the prodigiously productive Donald Knuth for your reading enjoyment. In this way, the comment was meant to show though tongue-in-cheek how great Knuth is for Comp-Sci. It was not an attempt to drag any company through the mud. That happens without me.

FWIW, here's a side-ways mention of Knuth's bounty, from http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html

> So I sat down with him and proofread the pages as they came out of the typewriter. It seemed that he was composing and typing as fast as I could read. By morning the manual was done. Years later when don's first book came but, he told me that if I would proofread it for him that he would pay me a dollar for every error that I found, including typographical errors. I took the offer as a great personal compliment at the time, but I think that he probably made that a standing-offer to anyone.

also from earlier in that essay:

> don claimed that he could write the compiler and a language manual all by himself during his three and a half month summer vacation. He said that he would do it for $5000. Our Fortran compiler required a card reader, card punch. line printer and automatic floating point. Don said that he would not need the card reader or card punch, but he wanted a magnetic tape unit and paper tape. I asked Gerard Guyod how Brad could have been suckered into paying this college kid $5000 to write something that had to be a piece of junk if he was only going to spend three and a half months on it. Gerard whispered his response to me. He said "We think that he already has it written. He probably did it in his spare time while working in the computer center at Case Institute." I still wasn't entirely satisfied with that answer because I was a college graduate whose first job was for 5325 per month and I had just changed jobs and was making $525 per month. Besides that it was taking mortal human beings 25 man-years to write compilers: not three and a half man-months. I thought that Brad had taker leave of his senses.

Thanks, there are a lot of gems in that piece.