Ai Koans

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 cannot 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.

See the JargonFile at http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html

I thought the story stated the novice was turning it on and off.

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