What do Zen masters and Virtual Adepts have in common? Why, the koans, of course.
by Anders Sandberg
Once a student asked Moore: “If all objects we see are parts of the user interface, then why not regard their graphic representations as part of the model?”. Moore answered: “are their coordinates arbitrary?”. “Yes, of course”. “Then the model is arbitrary”. The student was enlightened.
A master once asked Moore: “What is between the one and the zero”. “Line noise”.
When a thunderstorm hit the system, several terminals broke down and had to be repaired. “This wouldn’t have happened if we had had a voltage surge protector”, one electrician pointed out. “Does the voltage surges need to be protected?” asked Moore. “No, the terminals”. “Well, protect the lightening instead, it is much more general”.
A student had created a clever pattern in Game of Life, and proudly showed it to Moore: “I can prove that it’s behaviour is undecidable, since it is equivalent to the Halting Problem”. Moore ripped out the power cord from the computer, and the pattern vanished. “It has halted” he said. The student was enlightened, but the pattern was lost.
“Why do we have to learn about electronics when we seek to become software engineers?” an impatient person complained. Moore overheard it and plunged a soldering iron into the complainer’s workstation: “So that the software has somewhere to live”.
One day a student asked Moore: “Does Marvin Minsky know what he is talking about? Is the mind really a society of independent agents?”. “Why did you ask?”. “Because if that is true, then there is no me”. “Is there a Minsky?”. The student was confused, and told Minsky about it; Minsky smiled and said: “No”.
When a virus attacked the system, Moore was unperturbed and didn’t try to remove it: “It is not proper to do it before observing the correct signs”. “What are they?” asked a fellow master. “To watch the network load grow, to sacrifice the root partition to nothingness and to see the users learn fear.”
“Is there anything other than information in your world?” an ironic philosophy graduate once asked Moore. “No. That question was never asked”.
A student was struggling with his project, but with no success. Finally Moore asked him what the problem was. He answered: “I try to make this distributed database automatically migrate to unused nodes, but my processes deadlock since they cannot synchronise over the net?”. “Are they all running in the same direction?”. “Yes, of course”. “Well, backtrack randomly in time then”. The student was enlightened, and the program ran.