Quotes About Andrew Hodges

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.

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.

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

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

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