Quotes from Andrew Hodges

The point lay not in this or that label, but in the fact that this generation were going to think for themselves, take a wider view of the world than their parents had done, and not be frightened by bogey words.

For him, breaking the Enigma was much easier than the problem of dealing with other people, especially with those holding power.

Is there intelligence without life? Is there mind without communication? Is there language without living? Is there thought without experience?

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two.

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class.

can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise?

The point of what Einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as Alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion.

He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination.

He called the scientific subjects 'low cunning', and would sniff and say, 'This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!

For Alan Turing did not think of himself as placed in a superior category by virtue of his brains, and only insisted upon playing what happened to be his own special part.

317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

Alan had become more prepared to go along with the system. It was not that he had ever rebelled, for he had only withdrawn; nor was it now a reconciliation, for he was still withdrawn. But he would take the 'obvious duties' as conventions rather than impositions, as long as they interfered with nothing important.

He was one of those many people without a natural sense of left and right, and he made a little red spot on his left thumb, which he called 'the knowing spot

In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise?

Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.

Atheist, homosexual, eccentric, marathon-running English mathematician, A. M. Turing was in large part responsible not only for the concept of computers, incisive theorems about their powers, and a clear vision of the possibility of computer minds, but also for the cracking of German ciphers during the Second World War.

His machines - soon to be called Turing machines - offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world.

All this was wasted on Alan, whose set work was Hamlet. For a brief moment he pleased his father by saying that at least there was one line he liked. The pleasure was dissipated when Alan explained it was the last line: 'Exeunt, bearing off the bodies….

His was the other road to freedom, that of dedication to his craft.

The line between the 'mechanical' and the 'intelligent' was very, very slightly blurred.

But whatever these were, it was clear that here was part of Alan that was so; that part of his reality was shaped that way.

In 1950 he was hardly likely to be on trial for heresy. But he certainly felt himself up against an irrational, superstitious barrier, and his predisposition was to defy

David Hilbert, the towering mathematical intellect of the previous thirty years, had put it thus:9 'Mathematics knows no races … for mathematics, the whole cultural world is a single country'