There's ways to amuse yourself while doing things and thats how I look at efficency.

TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

By understanding a machine-oriented language, the programmer will tend to use a much more efficient method; it is much closer to reality.

AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires 'thinking' but has failed to do most of what people and animals do 'without thinking'-that, somehow, is much harder.

The book Dynamic Programming by Richard Bellman is an important, pioneering work in which a group of problems is collected together at the end of some chapters under the heading "Exercises and Research Problems," with extremely trivial questions appearing in the midst of deep, unsolved problems. It is rumored that someone once asked Dr. Bellman how to tell the exercises apart from the research problems, and he replied: "If you can solve it, it is an exercise; otherwise it's a research problem."

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.