Here’s a selection of Alan Turing Quotes, covering topics such as artificial intelligence, the enigma code, inspiration, love and life.
We really hope you enjoy these quotes and that they give you something to think about.
Alan turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.
Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.
Pidän ihmistä vaaleanpunaisena aistidatan kokoelmana.
No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
What if there was some kind of machine capable of working out the entscheidnugsproblem? this was the germ of the idea that eventually became a computer, but no such thing existed at the time.
His was the other road to freedom, that of dedication to his craft.
Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.
We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.
But whatever these were, it was clear that here was part of alan that was so; that part of his reality was shaped that way.
These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
For alan turing did not think of himself as placed in a superior category by virtue of his brains, and only insisted upon playing what happened to be his own special part.
O corpo fornece alguma coisa para o espírito cuidar e usar.
Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary…and if anything happens to him, you’ve got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before.
On the other hand, he did make a big step towards the practical creation of a turing machine by proposing that the binary system should be used, once again based on the kind of punchcards.
The original question, ‘can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.
A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.
No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain.
Machines can never think as humans do but just because something thinks differently from you, does it mean it’s not thinking?
It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.
A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely.
I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don’t accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams.
[…] ritardo ce ne sarà per forza, a causa di intoppi praticamente inevitabili, perché fino a un certo punto è meglio lasciare che ci siano intoppi piuttosto che spendere tempo sul progetto per essere sicuri che non ce ne siano (chissà quanti anni occorrerebbero per questa strada).
I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine… Gentle yet courageous, possessed, has a cultivated as well as a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own to approve or amend my plans.’ mary shelley, frankenstein, 1819.
Turing had important things to say on all of these, and he is probably best known for his wartime code-cracking, but he ought perhaps to be remembered more for his pioneering contribution to the very beginning of information technology.
I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.
turing believes machines think
turing lies with men
therefore machines do not think
yours in distress,
alan.
He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination.
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning”.
The historian hugh trevor roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’. One military policeman famously mistook bletchley for a military asylum. Turing.
Turing’s report left these questions hanging, but he did suggest a forerunner of what would eventually become the turing test: if you played chess against a learning machine, would you know if it was a human being or a computer?.
Natural wonders every child should know by edwin tenney brewster.
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.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
Do you know why people like violence? it is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes hollow.
Hilbert had written of galileo that in his recantation ‘he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom – that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.’ but this was not a trial of scientific truth.
I want a permanent relationship, and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent.
Think of it. A digital computer. Electrical brain.
He called the scientific subjects ‘low cunning’, and would sniff and say, ‘this room smells of mathematics! go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!.
David hilbert, the towering mathematical intellect of the previous thirty years, had put it thus:9 ‘mathematics knows no races … for mathematics, the whole cultural world is a single country’.
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.
Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.
All cretans are liars, as a cretan poet once told me.
Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about alan turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.
We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.
I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think Yours in distress, Alan
Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.
He was one of those many people without a natural sense of left and right, and he made a little red spot on his left thumb, which he called ‘the knowing spot.
Can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise?.
Out a calculation or apply an algorithm. Next.
For him, breaking the enigma was much easier than the problem of dealing with other people, especially with those holding power.
When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first… Of course, to observe is not its real duty, we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed…Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.
But the campaigners wanted more than just an apology; they wanted a proper pardon. The government refused on the grounds that it would set a precedent, even though pardons had recently been given to 18 former terrorists under the northern ireland agreement.
I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.
Was I God? No. Because God didn’t win the war. We did.
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.
Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.
Have you ever won a war, Turing?I have.Do you know how it’s done?Order, discipline, chain of command. You’re not at university any longer. You are a very small cog in a very large system. And you will do as your commanding officer instructs.
Infine vorrei avanzare qualche congettura sulle ripercussioni che le macchine calcolatrici elettroniche digitali avranno sulla matematica. Ho già accennato al fatto che l’ace svolgerà il lavoro di circa diecimila calcolatori umani; c’è da aspettarsi dunque che il calcolo manuale su larga scala scomparirà.
Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.
My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.
In 1950 he was hardly likely to be on trial for heresy. But he certainly felt himself up against an irrational, superstitious barrier, and his predisposition was to defy.
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.
Are you paying attention?
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
I like solving problems, Commander. And Enigma is the most difficult problem in the world.
In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise?.
To pass the turing test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.
Is there intelligence without life? is there mind without communication? is there language without living? is there thought without experience?.
All this was wasted on alan, whose set work was hamlet. For a brief moment he pleased his father by saying that at least there was one line he liked. The pleasure was dissipated when alan explained it was the last line: ‘exeunt, bearing off the bodies….
For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two.
Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.
If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
He made a more explicit defence of his tea-mug (again irreplaceable, in war-time conditions) by attaching it with a combination lock to a hut 8 radiator pipe. But it was picked, to tease him.
I know it’s not ordinary. But who ever loved ordinary?
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.
The point of what einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion.
Since 1941, according to his biographer andrew hodges, turing had been watching his proto-computers and decided that originality and intuition were processes that could be computed.
317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.
The line between the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘intelligent’ was very, very slightly blurred.
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