Okay, I know this has been around for over a decade and has circled the net many times. But, I was reading a colleagues .sig the other day (thanks Regan) and really liked this Koan, which I vaguely recall seeing a long time ago.
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly- “You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
I don’t know why, but it really struck a cord. The author, Danny Hillis, who has one of the more impressive bios I have ever seen, has a set of additional koans, but I like the “Knight” one best. “AI Koans” even made into the jargon lexicon, or so it says here, along with giving some other links to hacker humor.