At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

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
It is supposed to be funny.we laugh at how retarded the Sussman is for not realizing that randomizing the network didn't remove preconceptions, it just made the Sussman unaware of what they were. And also at the fact that he thought that tic-tac-toe was a task for a neural network, a game even chickens can be trained to play.