Alan Turing Quotes

English computer scientist (1912–1954)

Alan Mathison Turing (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

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Birth Name: Alan Mathison Turing

Alternative Names: Alan M. Turing • Alan Mathieson Turing • Turing • A. M. Turing

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Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.

The "scanned symbol" is the only one of which the machine is... "directly aware". However, by altering its m-configuration the machine can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has "seen" (scanned) previously.

If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour 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. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as "programming."

May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?

Some of the symbols written down will form the sequence of figures which is the decimal of the real number... being computed. The others are just rough notes to "assist the memory ". ...[O]nly ...these rough notes ...will be liable to erasure.