AI koan

    /A-I koh'an/ One of a series of pastiches of Zen
   teaching riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab
   around various major figures of the Lab's culture.

   See also ha ha only serious, mu.

   In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Marvin
   Minsky, Gerald Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers
   of note, that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's
   principal designers, and that David Moon wrote much of Lisp
   Machine Lisp.

   				 * * *

   A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning
   the power off and on.

   Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You
   cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no
   understanding of what is going wrong."

   Knight turned the machine off and on.

   The machine worked.

   				 * * *

   One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to
   make a better garbage collector.  We must keep a reference
   count of the pointers to each cons."

   Moon patiently told the student the following story:

        "One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand
        how to make a better garbage collector...

   [Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with
   circular structures that point to themselves.]

   				 * * *

   In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him
   as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

   "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

   "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play
   Tic-Tac-Toe", Sussman replied.

   "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

   "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play",
   Sussman said.

   Minsky then shut his eyes.

   "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

   "So that the room will be empty."

   At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

   				 * * *

   A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was
   eating his morning meal.

   "I would like to give you this personality test", said the
   outsider, "because I want you to be happy."

   Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into
   the toaster, saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."

   (1995-02-08)