Best 15 quotes of Alan Turing on MyQuotes

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

Bell Labs Cafeteria, New York, 1943: His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "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.

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.

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

In attempting to construct such (artificially intelligent) machines we should not be irreverently usurping His (God's) power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

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

[...] Queste difficoltà possono essere risolte nel modo migliore facendo buon viso a cattivo gioco. I ritardi possono essere tollerati accettandoli ed elaborando una scansione temporale che li preveda. Si può poi tollerare una certa imprecisione nella risposta pensando in termini di <>. Così invece di dire: <>, noi diremo: <>. Le varie classi devono essere del tutto distinte e ben lontane dal sovrapporsi, cioé - topologicamente parlando - potremmo dire che devono avere tra loro una distanza finita. Con una decisione del genere avremo introdotto una ben definita divisione del lavoro tra il matematico e l'ingegnere, che permetterà a ognuno dei due di andare avanti senza preoccuparsi se le sue assunzioni siano in accordo con quelle dell'altro.

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