Friam

hacker koan

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Prof David West

hacker koan

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.

davew

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: hacker koan

Meaning, what, exactly?

That there is game with rules
That there is a microprocessor and program with a certain order of operations (or not)
That there are precision limitations
That it is one class of neural net out of a family of possible architectures? (At the time it was probably single layer neural nets.)

I wonder why Minsky decided to be vague? Why is Sussman’s desire to avoid engineering a solution not an appropriate concern? Still to this day there is not really a science on how to choose a neural net connectivity. How many random leave-outs, how many skip-level links, etc.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 8:48 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: [FRIAM] hacker koan

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.

davew

Carl Tollander

Re: hacker koan

Minsky was simply illustrating you cannot avoid programming without preconceptions.

Another:

--------

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight (Tom 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.

--------

As a general strategy for fixing things over the phone, this strategy works much of the time. However, in this case, the point would be that the machine was always "working". The joke here is that in those days in most of the Lisp Machines (at least our Symbolics ones) all the boards had at least a few jumper cables, and that no two boards had quite the same jumpers, yet they "worked". Another is that we often turned off the GC and ran them til they ran out of memory, then power cycled.

So preconceptions are conserved; sometimes in one machine, sometimes in another.