Prudently, he picked a more conservative topic for his dissertation—Boolean circuits with cycles—and in 1959 he earned the world’s first PhD in computer science. His PhD advisor, Arthur Burks, nevertheless encouraged Holland’s interest in evolutionary computation and was instrumental in getting him a faculty job at Michigan and shielding him from senior colleagues who didn’t think that stuff was computer science. Burks himself was so open-minded because he had been a close collaborator of John von Neumann, who had proved the possibility of self-reproducing machines. Indeed, it had fallen to
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