Quotes About Turing

An Internet search engine is a finite-state, deterministic machine, except at those junctures where people, individually and collectively, make a nondeterministic choice as to which results are selected as meaningful and given a click. These clicks are then immediately incorporated into the state of the deterministic machine, which grows ever so incrementally more knowledgeable with every click. This is what Turing defined as an oracle machine.

The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or the absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making (or erasing) a mark somewhere else.

Where does meaning come in? If everything is assigned a number, does this diminish the meaning in the world? What Gödel (and Turing) proved is that formal systems will, sooner or later, produce meaningful statements whose truth can be proved only outside the system itself. This limitation does not confine us to a world with any less meaning. It proves, on the contrary, that we live in a world where higher meaning exists.

Turing was always a legend among computer/geeky kids. He was such an outsider in his own time, and because of that, he was able to see things differently. It was a story that had been well told in books, onstage and on TV, but never on film.

Turing showed that just as the uncertainties of physics stem from using electrons and photons to measure themselves, the limitations of computers stem from recursive self-reference. Just as quantum theory fell into self-referential loops of uncertainty because it measured atoms and electrons using instruments composed of atoms and electrons, computer logic could not escape self-referential loops as its own logical structures informed its own algorithms.12

And Türing answered another," Rudy said. "Who's that?" "It's me," Alan said. "But Rudy's joking. 'Turing' doesn't really have an umlaut in it." "He's going to have an umlaut in him later tonight," Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.

The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.

And don't give me any sentimental nonsense about creativity. I believe that a Universal Turing Machine could show behaviors that we would construe as creative.

Your thoughts on numerology are most interesting," Waterhouse says loudly, running Mr. Drkh off the rhetorical road. "I myself studied with Drs. Turing and von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton." Father John snaps awake, and Mr. Drkh looks as if he's just taken a fifty-caliber round in the small of his back. Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.

Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses. Along the way, she proved what was a foregone conclusion, namely, that the system for processing this language was essentially a more complex version of the mechanical organ, hence a Turing machine in essence.

Love is the Turing test, [...] It is how we check for life.

Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting.

Like Ada Lovelace, Turing was a programmer, looking inward to the step-by-step logic of his own mind. He imagined himself as a computer. He distilled mental procedures into their smallest constituent parts, the atoms of information processing.

Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.

Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as "the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board."?

At one point I emailed to ask if it was true, as my daughter had told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the German wartime codes and then committed suicide by biting into a cyanide-laced apple. He replied that he wished he had thought of that, but hadn't.

told me, that the Apple logo was an homage to Alan Turing, the British computer pioneer who broke the

ninguna máquina ha superado el test de Turing, una prueba bastante sencilla y, posiblemente, no demasiado significativa. Y, desde luego, ninguna ha superado el listón de Ada —aún más alto— de ser capaz de «originar» cualquier pensamiento propio.

El test de Turing, que él llamaba «juego de imitación», es sencillo: un interrogador remite preguntas por escrito a un humano y a una máquina que se encuentran en otra habitación, y trata de determinar a partir de sus respuestas cuál de los dos es el humano.

I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing'll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.

While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time, and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.

Alan Turing appears to be becoming a symbol of the shift towards computing, not least because of his attitude of open-minded defiance of convention and conventional thinking. Not only did he conceptualise the modern computer – imagining a simple machine that could use different programmes – but he put his thinking into practice in the great code breaking struggle with the Nazis in World War II, and followed it up with pioneering early work in the mathematics of biology and chaos.

He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form under the question: 'do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?' Turing had written 'No'.

Turing had important things to say on all of these, and he is probably best known for his wartime code-cracking, but he ought perhaps to be remembered more for his pioneering contribution to the very beginning of information technology.