Quotes & Sayings About Turing

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

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. — Alan Turing

Darwin's "strange inversion of reasoning" and Turing's equally revolutionary inversion were aspects of a single discovery: competence without comprehension. Comprehension, far from being a Godlike talent from which all design must flow, is an emergent effect of systems of uncomprehending competence: natural selection on the one hand, and mindless computation on the other. These twin ideas have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, but they still provoke dismay and disbelief in some quarters, which I have tried to dispel in this chapter. Creationists are not going to find commented code in the inner workings of organisms, and Cartesians are not going to find an immaterial res cogitans "where all the understanding happens". — Daniel C. Dennett

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

Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code. — Graham Moore

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. — Alan Turing

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

One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it! — Steven Johnson

Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought this was cruel
the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It's a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. — Catherynne M Valente

Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible. — Alan Turing

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. — Alan Turing

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too. — Kim Stanley Robinson

HIs chess-playing methods did the same thing - as did the games on the Colossi - and posed the question as to where a line could be drawn between the 'intelligent' and the 'mechanical'. His view, expressed in terms of the imitation principle, was that there was no such line, and neither did he ever draw a sharp distinction between the 'states of mind' approach and the 'instruction note' approach to the problem of reconciling the appearance of freedom and of determinism. — Andrew Hodges

Love is the Turing test, [ ... ] It is how we check for life. — Catherynne M Valente

There is, however, one feature that I would like to suggest should be incorporated in the machines, and that is a 'random element.' Each machine should be supplied with a tape bearing a random series of figures, e.g., 0 and 1 in equal quantities, and this series of figures should be used in the choices made by the machine. This would result in the behaviour of the machine not being by any means completely determined by the experiences to which it was subjected, and would have some valuable uses when one was experimenting with it. — Alan Turing

If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness. — Neal Stephenson

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

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. — Alan Turing

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. — Gordon Brown

Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. — James Gleick

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

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much. — Graham Moore

We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top. — Graham Moore

I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to. — Graham Moore

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. — Alan Turing

I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it. — Graham Moore

So are you conscious?" The alien robot - the skin the Miller construct was using - shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. "Don't know. Seems like I'm acing my Turing test, though. — James S.A. Corey

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

Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters - which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem - and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don't want to be standing at ground zero when that happens. — Charles Stross

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We — Peter Watts

It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turing to the window, I watched the birds fill the sky before disappearing, and when the air was still again, I watched the empty place where they had been. — Sue Monk Kidd

His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying. — Janna Levin

Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence. — Neal Stephenson

Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it. — Ian McDonald

During World War II, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators (prohibited from discussing their activities even with their families) to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces. Asperger's prediction that the little professors in his clinic could one day aid in the war effort had been prescient, but it was the Allies who reaped the benefits. — Steve Silberman

I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be. — David Lagercrantz

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. — Alan Turing

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 — Alan Turing

I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide. — Ken Wilber

Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah, Waterhouse says, or words to that effect. — Neal Stephenson

Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result. — Alan Turing

Where are you going?" Turing had asked.
"Nowhere."
"Me too. — David Lagercrantz

From a contradiction you may deduce everything — Janna Levin

Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider - to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.
(Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer) — Konrad Zuse

'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him. — Graham Moore

A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing's life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film. — Graham Moore

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. — Alan Turing

In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human. It is fitting that such an important landmark has been reached at the Royal Society in London, the home of British Science and the scene of many great advances in human understanding over the centuries. This milestone will go down in history as one of the most exciting. — Kevin Warwick

Messages from the unseen that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition. — Jim Holt

Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible. — Graham Moore

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. — Alan Turing

Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic. — George Dyson

Alan Turing is such an amazing, tragic story. — David Lagercrantz

Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider. — Graham Moore

I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I've known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him. — Graham Moore

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

I've now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven't the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I've not found out. — Alan Turing

Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting. — Catherynne M Valente

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

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations. — Neal Stephenson

It would probably never have occurred to him that his own difficulties with the world were akin to those suffered by women-- as with the men's committee meetings held over his head, almost as if he were not there, and the way people took little notice of what he had said or written, but remained obsessed by details of manners or appearance. Women had to learn to compensate for these indignities by making a special effort, but Alan Turing made no such attempt. He expected the male world to work for him, and was baffled when it did not. — Andrew Hodges

He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity. — David Boyle

When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend. — Eric S. Raymond

I want a permanent relationship, and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent. — Alan Turing

Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago. — Graham Moore

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. — Andrew Hodges

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

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present. — Gordon Brown

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

On 25 May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, speaking to the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as British contributors to science. Celebrity is an imperfect measure of significance, and politicians do not confer scientific status, but Obama's choice signalled that public recognition of Alan Turing had attained a level very much higher than in 1983, when this book first appeared. — Andrew Hodges

The apple was meant to take away the bitter taste, perhaps," he said.
"I imagine that Mr. Turing wasn't exactly looking for a taste experience," said Corell.
"Man always tries to limit his suffering. — David Lagercrantz

Will we even know when the first AGI is created? The first machine to become conscious may quickly achieve a reasonably clear understanding of its situation. Anything smart enough to deserve the label superintelligent would surely be smart enough to lay low and not disclose its existence until it had taken the necessary steps to ensure its own survival. In other words, any machine smart enough to pass the Turing test would be smart enough not to. It — Calum Chace

Turing needed more staff, but his requests had been blocked by Commander Edward Travis, who had taken over as Director of Bletchley, and who felt that he could not justify recruiting more people. On October 21, 1941, the cryptanalysts took the insubordinate step of ignoring Travis and writing directly to Churchill. — Simon Singh

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

Any [artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it." - IAN MCDONALD, River of Gods It — Nick Cole

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. — Alan Turing

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't. — Walter Isaacson

I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard. — Alan Turing

What's the point in being here if you have to follow a computer? What is this, a fucking Turing test in reverse? — Ahmir Questlove Thompson

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. — Neal Stephenson

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

And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative. — Neal Stephenson

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. — Alan Turing

What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time. — Brian Christian

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

We could try the Turin test," said Lobsang.
"Oh, machines have been able to pass the Turing test for years."
"No, the Turin test. We both pray for an hour, and see if God can tell the difference. — Stephen Baxter

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.
Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures. — Jaron Lanier

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. — Alan Turing

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. — Alan Turing

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination. — Graham Moore

At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later. — Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

A lot of the credit, too, should go to Turing, for developing the concept of a universal computer and then being part of a hands-on team at Bletchley Park. How you rank the historic contributions of the others depends partly on the criteria you value. If you are enticed by the romance of lone inventors and care less about who most influenced the progress of the field, you might put Atanasoff and Zuse high. But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. — Walter Isaacson

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close. — Ray Kurzweil

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

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore. — Yukihiro Matsumoto

His machines - soon to be called Turing machines - offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. — Andrew Hodges

Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game. — Alan Turing

With the increasingly important role of intelligent machines in all phases of our lives
military, medical, economic and financial, political
it is odd to keep reading articles with titles such as Whatever Happened to Artificial Intelligence? This is a phenomenon that Turing had predicted: that machine intelligence would become so pervasive, so comfortable, and so well integrated into our information-based economy that people would fail even to notice it. — Ray Kurzweil

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. — Alan Turing