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Creating imitation humans has been a target for the past twenty years or so. We now have robots on assembly lines and computerised voices on telephone systems. We are, however, nowhere near the computer that can read and understand Shakespeare – a device which artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky predicted in 1973 would be ready “in a few years’ time”. In Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists (Princeton, £24.95/$29.95, ISBN 0 691 03678 0), Lotfi Zadeh, one of the contributors says that the delay is not a problem of technology but of an approach trapped by “the albatross of classical logic”. As Patricia Smith Churchland says, language is probably not necessary for representing the world, yet all our models of mind are based on logic and language. The editors, Peter Baumgartner and Sabine Payr, have done a brilliant job. Enough food for thought to satisfy the most hungry of intellects.