In a traffic jam trying to get out from the Roskilde festival area in Denmark 1993, a girl riding an Intruder 1400 passed us, easily sliding past the hot cars and took off on the main road with her hair swirling in the wind. One look at that sight and both me and a friend realized that next year, we're going by bike.

A few weeks later, we found a book called "Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which we both read. Just for fun because of the intriguing title, but I realized more and more that this guy, Pirsig, is not kidding. I can't say that philosophy ranked very high on my interest scale until then, but this book got me hooked. It showed me that there are fundamental questions that haven't been answered very well and that we shouldn't be content with bad answers. Start looking for better ones instead.

The following spring, I found Lila in a bookstore and as I read it, I realized that Pirsig had spent the years between the books looking for such better answers. The Metaphysics of Quality not only has better answers to classical scientific questions, it also deals with previously unanswerable, and even unaskable, questions in a beautiful and simple way.

Being a computer scientist, I often try to use the MoQ to answer questions about artificial intelligence, and I've discovered that it has quite a few things to say about this subject.

I live in Linköping, Sweden and have been working as a computer consultant since I finished studying computer science in 1995. My Intruder 1400 takes me to work and the Roskilde festival each summer.