[PRL] AI Koans

[Mitchell Wand]

This is *very* old (original date is given as 1983), but some of you
may not have seen it before.  

In any case, Be Enlightened.

--Mitch 

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Subject: AI Koans
Keywords: chuckle, originally appeared in first quarter, 1989
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(From sri-unix!greiner at Diablo Sun Jul 24 17:21:00 1983)

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 can not 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...

            ------------------------------------------------


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."  "Why is the
net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.  "I do not want it to have any
preconceptions of how to play."  Minsky shut his eyes.  "Why do you
close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.  "So the room will be
empty."  At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

            ------------------------------------------------


A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to
Greenblatt.  As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by.  "Is it
true," asked the student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as
Lisp?"  Almost before the student had finished his question, Greenblatt
shouted, "FOO!", and hit the student with a stick.

            ------------------------------------------------


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:  "I wish the
toaster to be happy, too."

            ------------------------------------------------


A man from AI walked across the mountains to SAIL to see the Master,
Knuth.  When he arrived, the Master was nowhere to be found.  "Where is
the wise one named Knuth?", he asked a passing student.  "Ah," said the
student, "you have not heard.  He has gone on a pilgrimage across the
mountains to the temple of AI to seek out new disciples."  Hearing
this, the man was Enlightened.

            ------------------------------------------------


A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a
Xerox 1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser.
Wanting to help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network
with the mouse, and asked, "what do you see?"  Very earnestly, the
Undergraduate replied "I see a cursor."  The Hacker then quickly
pressed the boot toggle at the back of the keyboard, while simultaneously
hitting the Undergraduate over the head with a thick Interlisp Manual.
The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.

--
>From the RHF archives as selected by Brad Templeton, Maddi Hausmann and
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