Alan Turing

"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 …"

"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 …"

"We are not asking whether all digital computers would do well in the game nor whether the computers at present available would do well, but whether there are imaginable computers which would do well."

"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years befo…"