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• 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.
  -- Dijkstra...
• SUME Surprise Me
• We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.
  But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best....
• 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....
• Turing tar-pit n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical.
  Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers....
• Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical.
  Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers....