Alan Turing

"We need to distinguish between the machine in the physical sense and the machine in the abstract sense."

"I would not be surprised if psychology cannot be reduced to biology, but cannot be reduced to a single biological law."

"Do machines make mistakes? Absolutely, if you ask them the wrong questions."

"The human mind in its full development is a remarkable instrument."

"We should not demand of a machine that it should understand beauty any more than we demand this of a tree."

"Conversion of the M.U.C. to the M.C.E. involved stripping out all of the old equipment."

"It may be that one of the reasons why machines have seemed to be acting intelligently is that they have been fed carefully with information."

"The majority of machinery was destroyed in the war, but the intellectual capacity of mankind remained intact."

"I am afraid that the conclusion that machines cannot think is too hasty and possibly too cynical."

"We may now consider objections to the proposed question 'Can machines think?' in preference to objections to the original wording."

"Machines are given their instructions in a very literal manner by their operators."

"The practical uses of the universal computing machine are unbounded."

"But this objection is easily answered if we think of the machine as being the 'child-machine' of which we spoke earlier."

"The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be carried out by a human computer."

"Computing machinery and intelligence are not as separate as they might seem."

"We cannot demand that the computer should think like a human; we should demand that humans think like computers."

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

"One can say 'this Brasin is going to develop in such and such a way' but one cannot say so for a baby. There is the fallacy."

"The new problem has not the slightest chance of being solved before we can regularly design fairly large machine-storage capacities."

"Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books."

"Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible."

"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's."

"The question 'can machines think' is in itself confused and meaningless."

"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."

"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."

"The analog process is slow and the digital process is fast."

"Do you mean to tell me that this machine can think?"

"It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers."

"A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal computing machine."