Is "represents" a symmetric relation in the provided answer to TAOCP exercise 1.1.9?
I slept on it and remembered there was another wording issue that was bugging me: "generates an equivalence relation". I wasn't familiar with it and assumed it just meant "is an equivalence relation". Turns out I was wrong. It has a very specific meaning that Wikipedia describes thusly:


  Given any binary relation $A \subset X \times X$ on $X$, the equivalence relation generated by $A$ is the intersection of the equivalence relations on $X$ that contain $A$.


In short, no, "represents" isn't a symmetric relation, nor did Knuth claim it is; he claimed that an equivalence relation could be constructed from it, which is true. Apparently my "knowledge of high school algebra", listed as the primary prerequisite to reading, is lacking.