Alan Turing

"We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields."

"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."

"It is possible to produce the outline of a machine with very few wheels and very few axes."

"The real problem is that the problem of formulating everything explicitly is so difficult."

"Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with commonsense."

"We may say most of the things that can be said for the photograph album and magic lantern must be said for the machine thinking method."

"There would of course be a large number of readings which we should have to omit from the machine, owing to lack of time or storage."

"As soon as one accepts the Turing test as a viable measure of intelligence, one is committed to a very particular view of the mind."

"Let us suppose we have a machine which can be programmed in such a way that it will do the work of any given human computer."

"May I say that if the definition which I have given is accepted, the question 'Do machines think?' is equivalent to 'Are there imaginative digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'"

"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due to some confusion of ideas as to the rôle played by the computer in the experiments."

"Provided it is stipulated that digital computers cannot have much storage, the statement that 'digital computers can do whatever we require of them' is false."

"We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game, but whether one particular machine will."

"We should be able to speak of machines thinking without fear of contradiction."

"The idea is that we should have machines that are so intelligent that we need not preoccupy ourselves with their internal workings."

"A human has a 'soul' in the psychological sense, which is a collection of behaviors and attributes that define personality."

"The original question 'Can machines think?' is too meaningless to deserve discussion."

"Machinery will eventually outdo human intelligence, though one would have to set the threshold rather high to make this claim appear profound."

"If we try to make a machine imitate an adult human mind, it is very much like asking it to imitate a specialist in some technical field."

"A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that the conversation was with another human."

"The advantage of the digital computer is that it can be adapted to do the work of any other machine."

"The digital computers considered so far are all of discrete type. They deal only with information expressed in discrete or digital form."

"We may say that a digital computer has a considerable range of choice, within the range of its programming."

"Each machine might be termed a 'universal computing machine' in the sense that it can be made to do the work of any other computing machine."

"The statistical data to be supplied as an input for a machine of this type must be accurate."

"A machine is not tied down by its programming. It can be reprogrammed to do new tasks."

"The nature of such a machine must be made clear before we can discuss whether it thinks or not."

"What is the significance of the fact that a machine can win at chess? It demonstrates that thinking itself can be mechanized."

"The reader must accept it as a fact that digital computers can be constructed, and also that they can be made to follow any definite process which could be carried out by an inspector."

"Let us ignore the minutiae of technique."