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EXAMPLES Uncarved block "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. Unlike most real koans, this koan has a possible concrete answer: just as the room is not really empty when Minsky shuts his eyes, neither is the neural network really free of preconceptions when it is randomly wired. The network still has preconceptions, they are simply random now, and from a Random rather than a Human source. Interestingly, this particular koan seems to have been closely based on a real incident; the following text extract is from '''' (chapter 6): : "So Sussman began working on a program. Not long after, this odd-looking bald guy came over. Sussman figured the guy was going to boot him out, but instead the man sat down, asking, "Hey, what are you doing?" Sussman talked over his program with the man, Marvin Minsky. At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are." It was the most profound thing Gerry Sussman had ever heard. And Minsky continued, telling him that the world is built a certain way, and the most important thing we can do with the world is avoid randomness, and figure out ways by which things can be planned. Wisdom like this has its effect on seventeen-year-old freshmen, and from then on Sussman was hooked." {Link without Title} Victory A student was playing a handheld video game during a class. The teacher called on the student and asked him what he was doing. The student replied that he was trying to master the game. The teacher said, The student asked, The teacher said, The student gave him the game, and the teacher threw it to the ground, breaking it into pieces. The student was enlightened. A very similar story exists in the '' The Tao Of Programming ''. Enlightenment This koan is attributed to Tom Knight , one of the primary developers of the Lisp Machine at MIT: 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: Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked. Master Foo :''It is recorded that once, when Master Foo was Iterating along a beach, he came upon two of his disciples arguing by a computer processor. :"It is subtracting positive 1 "'', declared the first.'' :"No; it is adding negative 1"'', asserted the other.'' Master Foo answered them thus: Emacs and Bolio This particular koan is sometimes Punningly referred to as an "ice cream koan"; it deals with the early work of the GNU project: A cocky novice once said to , but why is the Justifier called Bolio?". His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, COLLECTIONS collection The Gateless Gate ). EXTERNAL LINKS
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