Quotes About Turing

The Turing Test was a brilliant idea, but it's evolved into a competition of chatbots.

Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.

To me, Turing is as much of a philosopher as he is a mathematician because his ideas deal with what it means to think.

Although I'm not prepared to move up my prediction of a computer passing the Turing test by 2029, the progress that has been achieved in systems like Watson should give anyone substantial confidence that the advent of Turing-level AI is close at hand. If one were to create a version of Watson that was optimized for the Turing test, it would probably come pretty close.

Admittedly Turing was not buried alive under a wall pushed over by a tank. He was offered a choice between two years in prison (you can imagine how the other prisoners would have treated him) and a course of hormone injections which could be said to amount to chemical castration, and would have caused him to grow breasts. His final, private choice was an apple that he had injected with cyanide.

Turing's report left these questions hanging, but he did suggest a forerunner of what would eventually become the Turing Test: if you played chess against a learning machine, would you know if it was a human being or a computer?

Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.

On the other hand, he did make a big step towards the practical creation of a Turing machine by proposing that the binary system should be used, once again based on the kind of punchcards

To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.

The historian Hugh Trevor Roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as 'friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy'. One military policeman famously mistook Bletchley for a military asylum. Turing

Since 1941, according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing had been watching his proto-computers and decided that originality and intuition were processes that could be computed.

If a man says 'I am lying' we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you were black in the face. Why not? It doesn't matter." For Turing, it did matter—not in some abstract or ideal sense but because he believed that hidden contradictions could result in things "going wrong.

Turing's years at Bletchley constitute the best-documented period in his life, yet in the end his work as a code breaker amounted to a very long diversion from his dream of building a universal machine. For the bombes were about as far from universal as you could get. Their very design guaranteed their obsolescence, since it depended on the quirks and particularities of another, much smaller machine, the Enigma, of which the bombe was the huge, distorted shadow.

It seems not improbable that when Turing let slip the fact of his homosexuality "accidentally," especially to a young man like Bayley, he was hoping against hope that the admission might provoke an expression of reciprocal desire. That rarely happened. Later he told Robin Gandy, "Sometimes you're sitting talking to someone and you know that in three quarters of an hour you will either be having a marvellous night or you will be kicked out of the room.

This is a man who was 23 years old when he theorized the idea of creating a programmable machine, and in that way, Turing foresaw computers and artificial intelligence. These were revolutionary ideas at that time.

Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.

On 25 May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, speaking to the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as British contributors to science. Celebrity is an imperfect measure of significance, and politicians do not confer scientific status, but Obama's choice signalled that public recognition of Alan Turing had attained a level very much higher than in 1983, when this book first appeared.

the global impact of pure science rises above all national boundaries, and the sheer timelessness of pure mathematics transcends the limitations of his twentieth-century span. When Turing returned to the prime numbers in 1950 they were unchanged from when he left them in 1939, wars

The rules of software are the same today as they were in 1946, when Alan Turing wrote the very first code that would execute in an electronic computer.

I had first heard about Alan Turing when I was a teenager. I've known about him since I was a kid, and I always wanted to write about him.

WHAT PRECISELY IS an algorithm, or a Turing machine, or a universal Turing machine? Why should these concepts be so central to the modern view of what could constitute a 'thinking device'?

Moreover, the slightest 'mutation' of an algorithm (say a slight change in a Turing machine specification, or in its input tape) would tend to render it totally useless, and it is hard to see how actual improvements in algorithms could ever arise in this random way. (Even deliberate improvements are difficult without 'meanings' being available.

I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think Turing lies with men Therefore machines do not think Yours in distress, Alan

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. ~ Alan Turing