The paper is surreal.<p>An AI paper that starts with experiments on drowning cats and religious chimpanzees.<p>Then it talks about making the system by cutting up a large wire mesh and assembling it back randomly.<p>Then it talks about simulating the system on a computer, and coding it in a programming language called YAWN that is like English.<p>Then it says that they could not obtain the machine that runs YAWN programs, so they emulated that machine on another computer (IBM 704).<p>Then it says (excitedly) that the machine printed gibberish when presented with a certain input and on another run ejected the input punched card twice.<p>I'm not sure if this is real or a joke.<p>I'm not sure if the experiment itself was designed as a joke to waste US military's computer time.<p>I'm not sure if this has some deep lessons.<p>To me, it felt like when Dumbledore set the chicken on fire in HPMOR.