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“As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“Nothing – I repeat – nothing can become so big an obstruction in your path that you cannot overcome it, for your brain is the most divine and most godly Turing Machine of all times, capable of deeds that humanity is yet to encounter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Saint of The Sapiens

“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain,” declared a famous brain surgeon, Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, in the prestigious Lister Oration in 1949.92 Turing’s response to a reporter from the London Times seemed somewhat flippant, but also subtle: “The comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“A code, which according to Turing's schema is supposed to make one machine behave as if it were another specific machine (which is supposed to make the former imitate the latter) must do the following things. It must contain, in terms that the machine will understand (and purposively obey), instructions (further detailed parts of the code) that will cause the machine to examine every order it gets and determine whether this order has the structure appropriate to an order of the second machine. It must then contain, in terms of the order system of the first machine, sufficient orders to make the machine cause the actions to be taken that the second machine would have taken under the influence of the order in question.”
― John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain

“What is amazing to me is not so much Turing’s imaginary construct but his hypothesis that there is only one type of universal computing machine. As far as we know, no device built in the physical universe can have any more computational power than a Turing machine. To put it more precisely, any computation that can be performed by any physical computing device can be performed by any universal computer, as long as the latter has sufficient time and memory. This is a remarkable statement, suggesting as it does that a universal computer with the proper programming should be able to simulate the function of a human brain.”
― William Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

“The theoretical limitations of computers provide no useful dividing line between human beings and machines. As far as we know, the brain is a kind of computer, and thought is just a complex computation. Perhaps this conclusion sounds harsh to you, but in my view it takes nothing away from the wonder or value of human thought. The statement that thought is a complex computation is like the statement sometimes made by biologists that life is a complex chemical reaction: both statements are true, and yet they still may be seen as incomplete. They identify the correct components, but they ignore the mystery. To me, life and thought are both made all the more wonderful by the realization that they emerge from simple, understandable parts. I do not feel diminished by my kinship to Turing’s machine.”
― William Daniel Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

“Turing proved, mathematically, that if you choose the right set of rules for the CPU and give it an indefinitely long tape to work with, it can perform any definable set of operations in the universe. It would be one of many equivalent machines now called Universal Turing Machines.”
― Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

“is all 1’s and 0’s underneath, and any Turing Machine can be programmed to handle it. Information processing is information processing is information processing. All digital computers are logically equivalent.”
― Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

“Turing Test: if a computer can fool a human interrogator into thinking that it too is a person, then by definition the computer must be intelligent. And so, with the Turing Test as his measuring stick and the Turing Machine as his medium, Turing helped launch the field of AI. Its central dogma: the brain is just another kind of computer.”
― Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

“As inspired by Alan Turing, intelligence equals behavior.”
― Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

“In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) published an article in Mind titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”[1] In it, Turing asked one of the most profound questions in the history of science: “Can machines think?” While the idea of thinking machines dates back at least as far as the bronze automaton Talos in Greek myth,[2] Turing’s breakthrough was boiling the concept down to something empirically testable. He proposed using the “imitation game”—which we now know as the Turing test—to determine whether a machine’s computation was able to perform the same cognitive tasks that our brains can. In this test, human judges interview both the AI and human foils using instant messaging without seeing whom they are talking to. The judges then pose questions about any subject matter or situation they wish. If after a certain period of time the judges are unable to tell which was the AI responder and which were the humans, then the AI is said to have passed the test.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI