Engineer questions "cleanroom" approach, shares Minsky neural net koan

BraaiEngineer · x · 2026-08-26

BraaiEngineer questions whether "cleanroom" reimplementations are truly clean if the frontier models used were trained on competing libraries' code. They then share a classic hacker koan where Sussman trains a randomly wired neural net to avoid preconceptions, and Minsky closes his eyes "so that the room will be empty," illuminating the nature of pre-training/bias.

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