Professor Edsger Dijkstra, at the ACN South Central Regional Conference, Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 Novemver 1984
Have you heard this quote before? The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.. If so where at?