AI隽语, Koans about Artifical Intelligence

textfiles.com/humor/COMPUTER/ai.koans

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."
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play."
Minsky shut his eyes,
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.

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In 1966, according to a well-known story, Marvin Minsky at MIT tasked his student Gerald Jay Sussman to “spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw.” However, building seeing machines was more difficult than anticipated.

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Gerald Sussman | MIT CSAIL

A conversation with Sussman on AI and asynchronous programming -- DustyCloud Brainstorms

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koan, a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment, 偈语？jì yǔ，附缀于佛经的一些读后感或修行的实践中得到的体悟写成的语句。因为多为四句组成，兼具文学的形式与内容，朗朗上口，尽管不是佛经的主要内容，也成为与佛经相提并论的典故。著名偈语有“菩提本无树，明镜亦非台。本来无一物，何处惹尘埃。”等。

隽语 jùn yǔ, 意味深长的言语, epigram, a short sentence that expresses an idea in a clever or amusing way

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The PDP-6 was DEC's first "big" machine. It used 36-bit words, in common with other large computers at the time from companies like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric. Addressing remained 18-bit, as in earlier DEC machines, allowing for a 256 kword main memory. Memory was implemented using magnetic cores; a typical system included 32,768 words (equivalent to 144kB on modern machines).

0.25 MIPS [link] FORTRAN compiler, text editor, a debugger, $120,000-$300,000

The PDP-6 was infamous because of the 6205 board, a large (11 × 9 inches) board which contained 1 bit of arithmetic register (AR), memory buffer (MB), and multiplier-quotient register (MQ) (thus there were 36 of these). It had 88 transistors, a two-sided PC etch, two 18-pin and two 22-pin connectors (two on each side of the module). Because of all these connectors, swapping this module was a major undertaking, and the mechanical coupling made it highly likely that fixing one fault would cause another. There was also a great fear of powering off a PDP-6, since it would generally result in at least one 6205 board failing. The experience with the 6205 led the designers of the first models of PDP-10, the KA10 and KI10, to use only small boards. It was not until the KL10 that large boards were used again.

 老外都长得差不多……