Hacker culture, and especially the artificial intelligence community at MIT, have invented a number of humorous short stories dubbed hacker koans about computer science; most of these are recorded in an appendix to the Jargon File, where they are called AI Koans. Most do not fit the strict religious definition of koans, but they do tend to follow the form of being short, enigmatic, and of often having a "punchline". The hacker culture is the voluntary subculture which first developed in the 1960s among hackers working on early minicomputers in academic computer science environments. ... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by an artificial entity. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research and educational institution located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. MIT is a world leader in science and technology, as well as in many other fields, including management, economics, linguistics, political science, and philosophy. ... Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... Hondas intelligent humanoid robot Artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as intelligence exhibited by an artificial entity. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Examples

Uncarved block

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.

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. Gerald Jay Sussman is the Matsushita Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). ... Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... The PDP-6 (Programmed Data Processor-6) was a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1963. ... Simplified view of an artificial neural network A neural network is an interconnected group of biological neurons. ... Tic-tac-toe, also called noughts and crosses and many other names, is a paper and pencil game between two players, O and X, who alternate in marking the spaces in a 3×3 board. ... The word random is used to express apparent lack of purpose, cause, or order. ... This article is about modern humans. ...

Interestingly, this particular koan seems to have been closely based on a real incident; the following text extract is from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (chapter 6): Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (ISBN 0385191952) is a book by Steven Levy about the hacker culture. ...

"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." [1]

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, "There exists a state in which you will not attempt to master the game, and the game will not attempt to master you."

The student asked, "What is this state?"

The teacher said, "Give me your video game, and I will show you."

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. The Tao of Programming is a book written in 1987 by Geoffrey James. ...

Enlightenment

This koan is attributed to Tom Knight, one of the primary developers of the Lisp machine at MIT: Tom Knight is a senior research scientist in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT EECS department. ... The original Lisp machine built by Greenblatt and Knight Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed (usually through hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. ...

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.

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: "Not incrementing, not decrementing- Equalizing!" whereupon both were enlightened.

A metasyntactic variable is either a placeholder name (a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion), or a random member of a class of things under discussion. ... Iteration is the repetition of a process, typically within a computer program. ... Number is the current mathematics collaboration of the week! Please help improve it to featured article standard. ...

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 pun (also known as paronomasia) is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. ... GNU (pronounced ) is a free software operating system. ...

A cocky novice once said to Stallman: "I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?". Stallman replied forcefully, "Names are but names, "Emack & Bolio's" is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software."

His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, "Neither Emac nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either."

An image of Richard Stallman from the cover of the OReilly book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallmans Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams (2002). ... GNU Emacs is one of the two most popular versions of Emacs (see also XEmacs). ... Emack & Bolios is a chain of ice cream stores in Massachusetts (originally; now with a few stores in other states, including New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Florida). ... Boston is a town and small port c. ...

Collections

Eric S. Raymond compiled the original AI Koans into a collection as part of his work on the Hacker's Jargon Dictionary. Inspired by them, he has written several pastiches, in toto entitled the "Rootless Root"[2] (a reference to the koan collection The Gateless Gate. Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the present maintainer of the Jargon File (also known as The New Hackers Dictionary). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation within hacker... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Gateless Gate (無門關, Zh. ...

External links

• The Jargon Wiki's AI Koans collection
• Jargon File Koans -(Eric S. Raymond's compilation)