All we want are the facts, ma'am.

Re:All we want are the facts, ma'am. by aston on Monday February 23, 2009 @10:19PM (#492594)

I love that Sussman story.

  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 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.

If you ever hear Sussman tell it, he'll claim Minsky actually told him "Randomly wired, it will have preconceptions--you just won't know what they are."

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Re:All we want are the facts, ma'am. by msie on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @02:46AM (#492788)

I love that story too! Can anyone point me to a collection of stories like that? I have read "Hackers..." by Levy and "The Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder.

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Re:All we want are the facts, ma'am. by yagiz on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @03:09AM (#492794)

The Jargon File has three more: http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_47.html#SEC54

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Re:All we want are the facts, ma'am. by jcl on Tuesday February 24, 2009 @10:02AM (#493099)

The Tao of Programming contains ancient Usenet wisdom:

http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

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