Alan Turing

1912–1954 · English computer scientist

Topics: artificial intelligence, programming, learning, creativity

• Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

  — Alan Turing

• We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qK which will be called " m-configurations ".

  — Alan Turing

• We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game nor whether the computers at present available would do well, but whether there are imaginable computers which would do well.

  — Alan Turing

• We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

  — Alan Turing

• The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol".

  — Alan Turing

• May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?

  — Alan Turing

• A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.

  — Alan Turing

• I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

  — Alan Turing

• Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

  — Alan Turing

• It is customary... to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. ... I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.

  — Alan Turing

• Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

  — Alan Turing

• This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be.

  — Alan Turing

• A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

  — Alan Turing

• The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

  — Alan Turing

• Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

  — Alan Turing

• We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.

  — Alan Turing

• Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of... intuition and ingenuity.

  — Alan Turing

• Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationer's. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.

  — Alan Turing