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[vital_sol]

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 M. 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.

(from ACM 1984)

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html

Comments

[vital-sol.livejournal.com]

Well, I rather think that the problem is that we don't know what "to think" means, and therefore we can argue a lot about can, for example, a platypus think? How about an ant? A butterfly? An amoeba?
If computer program can play chess, does it mean it can think?
(By the way, the program and not the computer plays chess, so computers definitely can not "think." We can argue whether computer programs can.)
At the same time, not having the definition of "thinking" doesn't stop us from making programs that can do useful things, like playing chess or searching the internet, and we can build/use those programs now and think about whether they can "think" later.
I think that's why Dijkstra used the analogy with Submarines (how we define "Swimming"? do you have to flap your flappers to swim?), also the analogy is rather weak.