Turing, Alan

"I believe that something like this might actually be done with a digital computer within the next twenty years or so."

"If we think of machines as having thoughts, we should be prepared to accept them as having feelings too."

"We must not suppose that his legislating or reasoning or calculating by machinery is a dream of wild imagination."

"The whole of this cycle is set in such a way that the values keep increasing in a certain direction as time passes."

"Let us now consider the statements which are made in most psychology and physiology textbooks."

"A very large part of space-time near the observer's body is occupied by material of very little interest."

"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be."

"Machines can only follow rules; humans can break them and create new ones."

"In the nervous system we have something which we know how to control absolutely by adding injections into it."

"The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner is determined as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under review."

"We shall only speak of machines thinking when the machine and the programme in operation one with the other produce some results that we should describe as thinking."

"An electric circuit is similar to an axon in that its action is determined by its initial state and its input."

"Progress in engineering allows us to put almost anything into almost anything else at some cost."

"One is trying to describe the behaviour of a brain which is made of atoms as much as anything else."

"What I'm trying to say is that we can build machines which will do everything that a human can do."

"The engineering difficulties are very great, it is true, but they will be overcome."

"I am afraid I must regard the whole of this point of view with some suspicion."

"A machine can be made to follow certain patterns of thought - but not all patterns."

"The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."

"Those who believe that in the future, digitalized machines will be able to think, are merely accepting a very reasonable extrapolation of current trends."

"The human engineer is supposed to be rather contemptuous of the mathematician, but without the mathematician he would be completely helpless."

"Providing he is supplied with an adequate system of logical instructions, a machine should be able to do anything that a human computer can do."

"Children are taught to learn from adults' mistakes, but the machine must learn from its own."

"The degree to which we regard something as thinking is determined by our own capacity to understand it."

"Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace's objection. One cannot 'choose' to obey the laws of nature."

"Programming a machine to recognize patterns is the first step toward genuine machine intelligence."

"The human computer works steadily through his list, but a machine would race through the same list."

"I believe machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields."

"We are not concerned with the fact that the brain is made of atoms."

"Men would not be excited by the idea of machines thinking unless they felt in some way humiliated by the possibility."