Alan Turing Quotes

“He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“One of the most famous paradoxes ever articulated is often known by the title ‘the liar’s paradox’. At its simplest you can express it just by saying: ‘I am lying’. The liar’s paradox is a complicated business, discombobulating to think about because after all, if I’m lying, then my statement ‘I am lying’ must itself be a lie, unless I was actually telling the truth, in which case I would have been telling a lie.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form under the question: ‘do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written ‘No’.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“out a calculation or apply an algorithm. Next,”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Perhaps this is not something that Turing, the great loner, would have done. He far preferred wrestling with problems alone and from first principles. But it meant that, when Turing returned to Bletchley in the summer of 1943, his arrival coincided with that of Newman’s Colossus machine. It had been designed partly by Tommy Flowers, an electronics engineer from Dollis Hill and it included 1,500 electronic valves. It used to catch fire and tear the printer tapes, but it worked. It was also arguably the first digital electronic computer.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Alan Turing appears to be becoming a symbol of the shift towards computing, not least because of his attitude of open-minded defiance of convention and conventional thinking. Not only did he conceptualise the modern computer – imagining a simple machine that could use different programmes – but he put his thinking into practice in the great code breaking struggle with the Nazis in World War II, and followed it up with pioneering early work in the mathematics of biology and chaos.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“humanity. The roots of the Turing Test in logical positivism and English philosophy is part of the problem. Turing was trying to find a way – not to decide the nature of humanity but whether machines could think. He saw no real distinction between whether the computer could fool an interrogator that it was human and whether it was actually thinking. In 1980 the English philosopher John Searle published his assault in an important philosophical article. It included with a story called ‘The Chinese Room’. Imagine a sealed room with a man who doesn’t understand Chinese inside, said Searle. Imagine he gets messages in Chinese, looks them up in a lexicon and finds them associated with other Chinese characters, which he passes back – without knowing that the messages he is getting are questions and the messages he is sending are answers. Now, the man might be able to convince the equivalent of Turing’s interrogator that he could understand Chinese, but actually he couldn’t.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Since 1941, according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing had been watching his proto-computers and decided that originality and intuition were processes that could be computed.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan poet once told me.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“But the campaigners wanted more than just an apology; they wanted a proper pardon. The government refused on the grounds that it would set a precedent, even though pardons had recently been given to 18 former terrorists under the Northern Ireland Agreement”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Turing has become a symbol for the modern world, as a prophet of information technology and scientific rationality, a martyr for gay rights, and also a genius cramped by convention and intolerance. He would have found none of these entirely comfortable. He is portrayed sometimes as a social misfit somewhere on the autistic spectrum – in fact he was a witty and entertaining friend. He was, in fact, a far more rounded figure than he is given credit for being. As for the symbolism of the apple, it is a bizarre twist of the modern world that Turing’s fatal apple is sometimes given the credit for being the original for the logo which now graces Apple computers”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“The Turing Test never claimed to be able to verify anything metaphysical, but that is where the debate is going. It is a debate about authenticity, which asserts or denies that there are attributes which are uniquely human, not so much conventional intelligence, but love, care and generosity. Turing believed that intuition was computable. Even if a computer passes his test, we won’t know if he was right or not.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“What if there was some kind of machine capable of working out the Entscheidnugsproblem? This was the germ of the idea that eventually became a computer, but no such thing existed at the time.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Turing had important things to say on all of these, and he is probably best known for his wartime code-cracking, but he ought perhaps to be remembered more for his pioneering contribution to the very beginning of information technology.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Turing’s report left these questions hanging, but he did suggest a forerunner of what would eventually become the Turing Test: if you played chess against a learning machine, would you know if it was a human being or a computer?”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“The historian Hugh Trevor Roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’. One military policeman famously mistook Bletchley for a military asylum. Turing”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“On the other hand, he did make a big step towards the practical creation of a Turing machine by proposing that the binary system should be used, once again based on the kind of punchcards”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Yet Enigma was a huge challenge. It looked like a typewriter, but with no space for paper. It had lights for each letter and, inside it, the three rotors (and later more than three) could be arranged in a range of different ways, each one linked to a different set of electrical connections. The key code, with the rotor setting, would be in a three letter key for each day, which all the machine operators would look up in the code book. It was believed to be impregnable. The three rotors could mean more than 17,000 different solutions for a given message, but – since the three rotors could be rearranged in any of six different ways – the number of combinations reached over 105,000.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine... gentle yet courageous, possessed, has a cultivated as well as a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own to approve or amend my plans.’ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1819”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma