Alan Turing

"I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicte…"

"Alan Turing - Towards a Digital Mind: Part 1"

"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in mak…"

"I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the …"

"May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?"

"The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. ...According to my definition, a number is computable if its decima…"

"Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance whi…"

"For some purposes we might use machines whose motion is only partially determined by the configuration... When such a machine reaches... ambiguous configurations, it cannot go on until some arbitrary …"