Alan Turing was a British mathematician, computer scientist, and codebreaker who played a critical role in breaking German codes during World War II. He was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England, and was the second of two sons of Julius Mathison Turing and Ethel Sara Stoney.
Turing showed exceptional abilities in mathematics and science from a young age, and he entered King’s College, Cambridge, in 1931 to study mathematics. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1934, he became a Fellow at the college, where he continued his research in mathematics and logic.
During World War II, Turing worked for the British government as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, where he developed a machine called the Bombe that could decipher encrypted German messages. His work was instrumental in cracking the Enigma code, which helped the Allies win the war.
After the war, Turing continued to work on the development of computers and artificial intelligence. In 1950, he published a paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he proposed the “Turing test,” a method for determining whether a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from that of a human.
However, Turing’s personal life was marred by persecution for his homosexuality, which was then illegal in the UK. In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to chemical castration. Two years later, he died from cyanide poisoning, which was ruled a suicide.
Turing’s contributions to the development of modern computing and artificial intelligence were groundbreaking, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the field. In 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an apology on behalf of the UK government for the way Turing was treated, and in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.
Here, we have curated some of the most popular quotes of Alan Turing Quotes On Artificial Intelligence And Computing
Alan Turing Famous Quotes
1. “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
2. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
3. “Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.”
4. “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
5. “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.”
6. “The imitation game begins with a man and a woman in separate rooms. The computer is in one room and must convince the man that it is the woman.”
7. “Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
8.“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.”
9. “The automatic machine has no such interests. Men are able to treat the most complex matters if they are simple, and the simplest if they are complex.”
10. “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.”
11. “A computer can be said to learn from experience if its performance on a particular task improves with experience, but not if its performance improves with the mere passage of time.”
12. “I am sure that in 200 years’ time, people will look back at our primitive methods and laugh.”
13.“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.”
14.“Advice about keeping secrets: it’s a lot easier if you don’t know them in the first place.”
15. “The difficulty is to discriminate between the signals and the noise.”
16. “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.”
17. “The Enigma machine is an electro-mechanical device. It is not a computer, but it performs computational operations.”
18. “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
19. “Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.”
20. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Alan Turing Love Quotes
21. “When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean. [pause] They say something else and you’re expected to just know what they mean.”
22. “Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.”
23. “If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
24. “Presumably the child-brain is something like a notebook as one buys it from the stationer’s. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.”
25. “May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?”
26. “Turing believes machines think; Turing lies with men; Therefore machines do not think”
27. “A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.”
28.“If a machine prints two kinds of symbols, of which the first kind (called figures) consists entirely of 0 and 1 (the others being called symbols of the second kind), then the machine will be called a computing machine.”
29.“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.”
30. “Mathematical reasoning may be regarded.”
31. “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.”
32. “It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporce a set of rules purpting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances.”
33.“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence.”
34.“Hardest time to lie to somebody is when they’re expecting to be lied to.”
35.“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities.”
36.“Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”
37. “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?'”
38. “The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.”
39. “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.”
40. “Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.”
Alan Turing Life Quotes
41.“Sometimes it’s the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
42. “Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.”
43. “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.”
44. “We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.”
45. “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.”
46. “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.’”
47.“If one wants to make a machine mimic the behavior of the human-computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table.”
48. “The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.”
49.“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”.
50. “We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.”
51. “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.”
52. “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.”
53.“My little computer said such a funny thing this morning.”
54.“No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain.”
55. “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”
56. “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.”
57. “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.”
58.“A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline is in effect a universal machine.”
59. “Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgments which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.”
60. “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 Quotes On Science
61.“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.”
62.“For some purposes, we might use machines (choice… or c-machines) whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration… When such a machine reaches… ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary choice has been made by an external operator.”
63. “We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, …, qK which will be called ‘m-configurations'”.
64. “The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction.”
65. “Sometimes it is the people who no one imagined anything of who do the things that no one can imagine”