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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
by keithflower 12y ago
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.
Hacker Koans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan
- makmanalp 12y agoThis one is my favourite: 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. It's often not this dramatic but I see this happen all the time, when someone doesn't know the source of a problem and tries to solve it by brute force (with C, it's usually "adding and removing * and & until it works") when stopping to understand what's going wrong would have lead them to the issue directly.