Professor Edsger Dijkstra, at the ACN South Central Regional Conference, Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 Novemver 1984

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.