Top 15 Alan Turing Quotes

English computer scientist (1912–1954)

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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.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Alan Mathison Turing

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

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

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

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

Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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