Famous Quotes by Alan Turing

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

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or composer's, must be discovered, rather than imposed.

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

The computing machinery and intelligence must be built so that it is in principle impossible to make a machine that will perform a task that the machine does not have the ability to learn.

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

The most important thing we can do is to accept that we cannot predict the future.

There is no law that says machines must be built according to their original design.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

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

The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.

Machines can do the work of a hundred men, but they cannot do the work of one human being.

In the end, machines will make our lives easier, but it is people who will make the world better.

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

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

We can’t help but marvel at the wonders of the universe, yet we can only know a fraction of it.

It is not the machines that matter, but the people who build them.

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

What we want is a machine that can learn from experience.

To be a mathematician is to be a maker of patterns.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

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.

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

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

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.

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 in turn and who in turn absorb his.

Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.

I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'

If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

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

We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

The only way to prove that something is possible is to go ahead and do it.

Computers are like humans: they do everything in binary.

Mathematics and computing are intertwined, much like DNA and the mechanisms that carry it to function.

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

Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.

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

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

The great advance of mathematical science has provided us with an ability to describe the structures of natural objects in terms of mathematical equations.

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.

I want a good mathematical notation that will allow me to write about programming without the need to express my ideas in the language of a machine.