The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conje… - Alan Turing

The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles.

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, ..., q_K which will be called " m-configurations ".

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."