Hacker koan

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Out of hacker culture, and especially the artificial intelligence community at MIT, there have sprung a number of humorous short stories about computer science dubbed hacker koans; most of these are recorded in an appendix to the Jargon File, where they are called AI Koans. Most do not fit the usual pattern of koans, but they do tend to follow the form of being short, enigmatic, and often revealing an epiphany.


Uncarved block[edit]

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.




A student was playing a handheld video game during a class.
The student replied that he was trying to master the game.
The student asked, "What is this state?"

A very similar story exists in the The Tao of Programming.


This koan is attributed to Tom Knight, one of the primary developers of the Lisp machine at MIT:

Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.

Master Foo[edit]

It is recorded that once, when Master Foo was iterating along a beach, he came upon two of his disciples arguing by a computer processor.
"It is subtracting positive 1", declared the first.
"No; it is adding negative 1", asserted the other.
Master Foo answered them thus: "Not incrementing, not decrementing — Equalizing!" whereupon both were enlightened.
(Derived from "Huineng's flag", Case 29, The Gateless Gate.)

Emacs and Bolio[edit]

This particular koan is sometimes punningly referred to as an “ice cream koan”, though that term also refers to an ice cream koan in The Dharma Bums. This koan refers to AI Lab tools that predate the GNU project:

A cocky novice once said to Stallman: “I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?” Stallman replied forcefully: “Names are but names, ‘Emack & Bolio's’ is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.”
His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him: “Neither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.” (The store is named after two homeless men.[1])

A possible interpretation is that this is about the arbitrariness of identifiers in computer code—the names of variables do not affect the function of the code.


Eric S. Raymond compiled the original AI Koans into a collection as part of his work on the Hacker's Jargon Dictionary. Inspired by them, he has written several pastiches, in toto entitled the Rootless Root (a reference to the koan collection The Gateless Gate). Raymond notes that Danny Hillis invented the AI koan while a student at MIT.[2]

A different collection of fables, based on corporate software engineer culture instead of unix hacker culture, written in the style or spirit of Zen koans, is The Codeless Code.[3] It features purely fictional characters (mostly masters and monks) in a quasi-Far-Eastern setting. The stories explore topics related to modern software development. The name for this site is also a reference to The Gateless Gate.


  1. ^ "Our Rock ’n Roll Roots". Emack & Bolio's. Retrieved 2012-02-25. 
  2. ^ Raymond, Eric S. (1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary (3rd edition ed.). MIT Press. p. 513. 
  3. ^ "The Codeless Code". Qi. Retrieved 2014-03-03. 

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