Bitwise Tricks and Techniques, Binary Decision Diagrams

The latest piece of volume 4 of Knuth's classic work on programming.

* This fascicle applies basic ideas about Boolean operations and Boolean evaluation to make computer programs run fast.
* This fascicle is the 'missing piece' of the first part of Volume 4; readers can now read all the way from Fascicle 0 to Fascicle 4.
* Contains many new exercises, arranged carefully for self-instruction, together with detailed answers.

To begin the fourth and later volumes of this monumental work on programming, Knuth has created a series of small books called fascicles, which publish at regular intervals as they are ready. Each fascicle encompasses a section or more of wholly new material. Ultimately, the content of these fascicles will be rolled up into the comprehensive, final version of each volume. This Fascicle starts what will become by far the longest section of The Art of, covering combinatorial algorithms. Combinatorial Computer Programming algorithms, informally, are techniques for the high-speed manipulation of extremely large quantitites of objects, such as permuations or the elements of graphs. Combinatorial patterns or arrangements solve vast numbers of practical problems, and modern approcashed to dealing with them often lead to methods that are more than a thousand times faster than the procedures of the past. This fascicle applies basic ideas about Boolean operations and Boolean evaluation to make computer programs run fast.