«[...] As computer science and artificial intelligence deal more and more with distributed and interactive systems, processes, concurrency, agents, causes, transitions, communication and control (to name a few), the researcher in this area is having more and more in common with the traditional philosopher who has been analysing such questions for centuries (unrestricted by the capabilities of any hardware).
The principles governing the interaction of several processes, for example, are abstract and similar to principles governing the cooperation of two large organisations. A detailed rule based effective but rigid bureaucracy is very much similar to a complex computer program handling and manipulating data. My guess is that the principles underlying one are very much the same as those underlying the other.
I believe the day is not far away in the future when the computer scientist will wake up one morning with the realisation that he is actually a kind of formal philosopher!»
(Dov M. Gabbay, a pag. vii dell'introduzione di
Abramsky - Gabbay - Maibaum, Oxford University Press, 0198537816)
Occorre forse commentare ? Semplicemente sublime, e soprattutto incontrovertibile.
