January 26, 2016 at 02:24AM

Today I Learned: 1) ...how to reserve meeting rooms at Caltech. 2) Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of AI research, was still alive until yesterday! ... He just died from a cerebral hemorrhage. I also learned, from Minsky's wikipedia, of a nice little hacker koan from the Jargon File featuring Minsky, which I will reproduce here. (Incidentally, if you haven't checked out the Jargon File, you should) 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 then 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. 3) There are a lot of ways in which people believe they can tell the sex of an unborn baby. They are all wrong except for a) ultrasound or other imaging techniques that can actually look, c) genetic tests, or d) only using embryos pre-screened for one sex. There is also a very slight but statistically significant correlation between extreme, debilitating morning sickness and having a daughter rather than a son. Many, many other techniques have been systematically tested and shown to be no more accurate than chance, including measuring the belly of the mother, measuring heartate of the baby, intensity of morning sickness (again, only slightly and only for the strongest morning sickness!), and a weird test involving Drano.