Re: Lojban's imperfections?

[Seth Golub <seth@CS.WUSTL.EDU>]

Christian Richard <cprchrd@MAILSERV.MTA.CA> writes:

> Are there again reasons why this order is not culturally neutral and
> wasn't originally determined randomly instead of matching the
> natural order the arguments would have in English?

This reminds me of a wonderful story from the Jargon File.
http://www.fwi.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/s/SomeAIKoans.html


  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.