Alan Turing Quotes

“most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons? Could machines have emotions? Do our emotions and our intellects belong to separate compartments of our selves? Could machines be enchanted by ideas, by people, by other machines? Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love? What would be the social norms for machines in love? Would there be proper and improper types of machine love affairs? Could a machine be frustrated and suffer? Could a frustrated machine release its pent-up feelings by going outdoors and self-propelling ten miles? Could a machine learn to enjoy the sweet pain of marathon running? Could a machine with a seeming zest for life destroy itself purposefully one day, planning the entire episode so as to fool its mother machine into ‘thinking’ (which, of course, machines cannot do, since they are mere hunks of inorganic matter) that it had perished by accident?”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“[quoting British philosopher Edward Carpenter] I used to go and sit on the beach at Brighton and dream, and now I sit on the shore of human life and dream practically the same dreams. I remember about that time that I mention - or it may have been a trifle later - coming to the distinct conclusion that there were only two things really worth living for - the glory and beauty of Nature, and the glory and beauty of human love and friendship. And to-day I still feel the same. What else indeed is there? All the nonsense about riches, fame, distinction, ease, luxury and so forth - how little does it amount to! These things are so obviously second-hand affairs, useful only and in so far as they may lead to the first two, and short of their doing that liable to become odious and harmful. To become united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature (but, Lord help us! we are far enough off from that at present), and to become united with those we love - what other ultimate object in life is there? Surely all these other things, these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one's living - if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The separation between any two events in the history of a particle shall be a maximum or minimum when measured along its world line.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons.15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it: In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires … The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy side of the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“He made a more explicit defence of his tea-mug (again irreplaceable, in war-time conditions) by attaching it with a combination lock to a Hut 8 radiator pipe. But it was picked, to tease him.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to us, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“It was difficult enough being a mathematician, this being the frightening subject of which even educated people knew nothing, not even what it was, and of which they might proudly boast ignorance. His”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“God, having created his Universe, has now screwed the cap on His pen, put His feet on the mantelpiece and left the work to get on with itself.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“Hilbert, who was always down-to-earth, liked to say: ‘One must always be able to say “tables, chairs, beer-mugs”, instead of “points, lines, planes”.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“the global impact of pure science rises above all national boundaries, and the sheer timelessness of pure mathematics transcends the limitations of his twentieth-century span. When Turing returned to the prime numbers in 1950 they were unchanged from when he left them in 1939, wars”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“His studies of the various branches of Indian law, the Tamil language and the history of British India then won him seventh place again in the Final ICS examination of 1896.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“HIs chess-playing methods did the same thing — as did the games on the Colossi — and posed the question as to where a line could be drawn between the 'intelligent' and the 'mechanical'. His view, expressed in terms of the imitation principle, was that there was no such line, and neither did he ever draw a sharp distinction between the 'states of mind' approach and the 'instruction note' approach to the problem of reconciling the appearance of freedom and of determinism.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The opening of a public debate about male homosexuality in Britain in 1952 was the conflict of the small back room, in another sphere.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“The line between ‘mathematicians’ and ‘engineers’ was demarcated very clearly, and if not quite an Iron Curtain, it was a barrier as awkward as the MacMahon Act.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise? Could a machine communicate with humans on an unlimited set of topics through fluent use of a human language? Could a language-using machine give the appearance of understanding sentences and coming up with ideas while in truth being as devoid of thought and as empty inside as a nineteenth-century adding machine or a twentieth-century word processor? How might we distinguish between a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind and a cleverly constructed but hollow language-using facade? Are understanding and reasoning incompatible with a materialistic, mechanistic view of living beings? Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will? In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Online search engines, which work with such astonishing speed and power, are algorithms, and so equivalent to Turing machines. They are also descendants of the particular algorithms, using sophisticated logic, statistics and parallel processing, that Turing expertly pioneered for Enigma-breaking. These were search engines for the keys to the Reich. But he asked for, and received, very little public credit for what has subsequently proved an all-conquering discovery: that all algorithms can be programmed systematically, and implemented on a universal machine.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“On 25 May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, speaking to the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as British contributors to science. Celebrity is an imperfect measure of significance, and politicians do not confer scientific status, but Obama’s choice signalled that public recognition of Alan Turing had attained a level very much higher than in 1983, when this book first appeared.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“All that I can claim is that my deliberate policy of leaving him largely to his own devices and standing by to assist when necessary, allowed his natural mathematical genius to progress uninhibited …”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“had the effect of increasing state dependence upon machinery not only beyond the control, but even completely outside the knowledge, of those who paid for it.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“corpus as with mens, and found the same difficulties with both: a lack”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be … Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting ‘Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law’.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Yet the system prevailed, in all but details. One could conform, rebel, or withdraw – and Alan withdrew.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Riemann Hypothesis,”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“Turing machine.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma

“had explicitly been concerned to treat mathematics as if it were a chess game, without asking for a connection with the world. That question was, as it were, always left for someone else to tackle.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“he talked excitedly of the future of automatic computers, and reassured them that mathematicians would not be put out of work. In”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

“One is perhaps too inclined to think only of him alive at some future time when we shall meet him again; but it is really so much more helpful to think of him as just separated from us for the present.”
― Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game