Re: Lisp

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2020 at 00:28, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> This is maybe the best part of that article, of which there
> are lots of good parts:
>
>   'Why did you make the net random?' and I said, 'Well, I
>   didn't want it to have preconceived misconceptions', and he said,
>   'Well it has them, its just that you don't know what they are.'

ESR (citing Danny Hillis) retells this story differently:

    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.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html