Quotes About Alan Turing

#1. I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.

Graham Moore

#2. 'The Imitation Game' is a celebration of Alan Turing's life and legacy, and Joan's final monologue is our eulogy. It's the thing we all wished we could have said to him.

Graham Moore

#3. I'm not gay, but I don't think you have to be gay to have a gay hero. Growing up, Alan Turing was certainly mine. I'm also not the greatest mathematician of my generation. We have lots of biographical differences, but nonetheless, I always identified with him so much.

Graham Moore

#4. Messages from the unseen that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Jim Holt

#5. I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be.

David Lagercrantz

#6. Among tech-minded kids, I think Alan Turing was a tremendous inspiration. He was a guy that was so different than the people around him. He was an outsider in his own time, but because he was an outsider is precisely why he was able to accomplish things nobody thought was possible.

Graham Moore

#7. Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider.

Graham Moore

#8. Telling Alan Turing's story in a two-hour film was a tremendous challenge. It felt in some small way like our filmmaking version of breaking the enigma code.

Graham Moore

#9. 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.

Graham Moore

#10. I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.

Graham Moore

#11. Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic.

George Dyson

#12. We always knew that we didn't want to show Alan Turing in the act of suicide - it was our feeling that would tip over into melodrama too quickly and seem over-the-top.

Graham Moore

#13. If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. - Alan Turing

Stuart Firestein

#14. Alan Turing is such an amazing, tragic story.

David Lagercrantz

#15. A lot of biopics to me feel very much like someone is standing in front of the camera and is reading a Wikipedia page to you, like someone is reciting event. Did you know this happened? Did you know that happened? But Alan Turing's life deserved a sort of passionate film, and an exciting film.

Graham Moore

#16. Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state.

Andrew Hodges

#17. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.

Gordon Brown

#18. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.

Alan Turing

#19. A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.

Alan Turing

#20. The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.

Alan Turing

#21. Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes hollow.

Alan Turing

#22. 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

Alan Turing

#23. Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

Alan Turing

#24. One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, "My little computer said such a funny thing this morning".

Alan Turing

#25. Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.

Alan Turing

#26. A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.

Alan Turing

#27. Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.

Alan Turing

#28. Instruction tables will have to be made up by mathematicians with computing experience and perhaps a certain puzzle-solving ability. There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself.

Alan Turing

#29. Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain.

Alan Turing

#30. The Exclusion Principle is laid down purely for the benefit of the electrons themselves, who might be corrupted (and become dragons or demons) if allowed to associate too freely.

Alan Turing

#31. I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.

Alan Turing

#32. It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers ... They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.

Alan Turing

#33. We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.

Alan Turing

#34. 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 contradicted.

Alan Turing

#35. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Alan Turing

#36. We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.

Alan Turing

#37. No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Alan Turing

#38. Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.

Alan Turing

#39. I want a permanent relationship, and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent.

Alan Turing

#40. Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.

Alan Turing

#41. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

Alan Turing

#42. I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don't accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams.

Alan Turing

#43. The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.

Alan Turing

#44. Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.

Alan Turing

#45. Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.

Alan Turing

#46. When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first ... Of course, to observe is not its real duty, we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed ... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious.

Alan Turing

#47. These disturbing phenomena [Extra Sensory Perception] seem to deny all our scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.

Alan Turing

#48. Finding such a person makes everyone else appear so ordinary ... and if anything happens to him, you've got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world, and a kind of isolation that never existed before.

Alan Turing

#49. From a contradiction you may deduce everything

Janna Levin

#50. Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

Alan Turing