Re:Chief scientist of major corporation can’t handle critici...
by aidenn0 on Wednesday November 23, 2022 @12:43PM
(#33722232)
A Koan (公案) is a concept from Zen Buddhism. Zen made its way into pop-culture (or at least the popular counter-culture movement) in the US in the 1960s via several writers of the Beat Generation. Project MAC at MIT was founded in the early 60s (Gerald Sussman started there in '64 I think)? So a number of faux Koans were in circulation in the AI crowd by about 1970.
I never found them laugh-out-loud funny myself.
This is probably a reference to those.
[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/