Quotes from Alan Turing

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.

The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life. He may then perhaps do a little research of his own and make a very few discoveries which are passed on to other men. From this point of view the search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals.

The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

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.

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.

I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.

Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine

It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result. Conjectures are of great importance since they suggest useful lines of research.

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

Pidän ihmistä vaaleanpunaisena aistidatan kokoelmana.

It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances.

Sometimes it's the very people who no one imagines 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. ~ Alan Turing

The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction.

O corpo fornece alguma coisa para o espírito cuidar e usar.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.