Alan Turing

"The play test will be more practicable than the others, and we do not have to worry about the fact that it is a little vague."

"What we want is a machine that can learn from experience."

"I would say that a system is thinking if we cannot reasonably deny it the possibility of thought."

"The idea of 'mechanical' mind originally suggested something rather negative, but automation has taught us to take the idea more seriously."

"We are not concerned with the fact that the computer has a head, or with the fact that it lacks a skull."

"The question of whether Machines Can Think is itself an expression of human concern rather than a technical question."

"Instead of always insisting on doing exact logical deductions we might have machines that would simulate the statistical behavior of nervous tissue."

"One might say that the sense in which we are speaking of 'thinking' is a very particular one, and when we call any machine a 'thinking machine' we are using 'thinking' in this sense."

"It is necessary to have some discipline if one is to be a mathematician or logician at all."

"Some of these difficulties are of the sort to be expected if we were to try to imitate a brain of lower complexity."

"The capacity to take pleasure in beauty is essential to a full human life."

"We may suppose that something like this actually happens in the living brain."

"The errors in the rules are of course rather serious things."

"We can imagine each reaction as being produced by the interaction of a nervous system with the external world."

"Certainly nothing we know now makes these aims impossible."

"It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy."

"This gives us an objectively verifiable way of determining whether a machine can think."

"We need not always majorize. We might occasionally minimize."

"The idea of a thinking machine has haunted many minds, both as fascination and as terror."

"In mathematics we don't really understand things, we just get used to them."

"The isolation created by the war was painful, but it had a clarifying effect on one's thinking."

"Can a machine pretend to be a man? If not, why not?"

"The whole of this rather painful discussion can be summed up in this: the claim that 'machines cannot think' is nonsense."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of the world is an affront."

"There will always be something which corresponds to the behavior of a brain."

"Computable numbers are not merely theoretical; they are central to understanding computation itself."

"We do not need to program a computer with every fact; we need to give it the method for finding facts."

"A digital computer may be thought of as consisting of several parts."

"The child as a race has certain drawbacks for education in a machine."

"Whether a machine can actually think is more a matter of convention than of actual fact."