Hacker koan

A hacker koan is a funny short story about computer science. Hackers like the artificial intelligence (AI) group at MIT made the term. A book called the Jargon File has many koans called AI Koans. Most koans are not the same as kōans in Zen Buddhism, but both kinds of koans are short, mysterious, and have a hidden meaning.

Examples

Uncarved block

Like Zen koans, this might have a real and correct answer. In the story, the room is not really empty when Minsky shuts his eyes, and the neural network might still have assumed something when it is randomly set up. The assumptions are random instead of from a human, but they still exist.

This story may be from a real story from Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (chapter 6):

Victory

A story like this is in The Tao of Programming.

Enlightenment
Tom Knight might have written this. He helped make the Lisp machine at MIT:

To reboot a degraded system is to discard an opportunity to troubleshoot and understand the cause of the failure. Knight, having contributed to the machine's design, presumably has some intuition about the current failure and is thus qualified to reboot it.

Emacs and Bolio
This koan is sometimes called an "ice cream koan". The word "koan" sounds like "cone" in the phrase "ice cream cone", so the name is a pun. There is another "ice cream koan" in The Dharma Bums. This koan talks about AI lab tools from before the GNU project:

(The store is named after two homeless men.)

Books of koans
Eric S. Raymond put the first AI Koans in a book called Hacker's Jargon Dictionary. He says that Danny Hillis created them when he was a student at MIT.

The Codeless Code is a different book about software engineers at big businesses instead of unix hackers. The stories in it are like traditional Zen koans. Every character is made-up, and most are masters and monks in a place like the Far East. The stories talk about things like making software. The name comes from a book called The Gateless Gate.

Notes

Other websites
Jargon File Koans compiled by Eric S. Raymond
The Unix Koans of Master Foo compiled by Eric S. Raymond

Category:Computer science
Category:Humor