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 "" (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:
This means that a simple idea can be the right idea.
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:
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".