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I was fortunate to have Gerry teaching my section of 6.031 (the predecessor of 6.001). I remember a story he liked to tell about why he thought Marvin Minsky

I was fortunate to have Gerry teaching my section of 6.031 (the predecessor of 6.001). I remember a story he liked to tell about why he thought Marvin Minsky was very smart. Gerry was building some kind of connectionist system -- a neural net or something, I don't recall exactly -- and mentioned to Marvin that he was initializing the weights randomly "so it won't have any preconceptions". Marvin replied, "Of course it will have preconceptions! You just won't know what they are. "

Wilduck 15y ago
This is an "AI Koan" that I've read before. I love all of these, and it's nice to hear that there's some truth to (at least one of) them. http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/s/someaikoans.html http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/s/someaikoans.html
- gwern 15y ago
  If you looked at the Wikipedia article, you'd see a citation to Levy's _Hackers_ for that AI koan :) (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AI_koans#Uncarved_block https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AI_koans#Unca... is not the best Wikipedia article I've worked on, but in some respects, it's one of the more special ones.)