Top 80 Turing's Quotes
#1. '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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.
Ken Wilber
#6. Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah, Waterhouse says, or words to that effect.
Neal Stephenson
#7. 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
#8. Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.
Alan Turing
#9. 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
#10. 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.
James Gleick
#11. Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Alan Turing
#12. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Eric S. Raymond
#13. 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
#14. Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.
Neal Stephenson
#15. 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
#16. The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.
Alan Turing
#17. What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
Brian Christian
#18. Alan Turing, to me, always felt like an outsider's outsider.
Graham Moore
#19. Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We
Peter Watts
#20. A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine.
Alan Turing
#21. One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!
Steven Johnson
#22. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained.
Alan Turing
#23. His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.
Janna Levin
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.
Mark Haddon
#27. We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.
Alan Turing
#28. 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
#29. Turing knew of Babbage's work, and the universal Turing machine can be seen as a reincarnation of Difference Engine No. 2. In fact, Turing had gone much further, and provided computing with a solid theoretical basis,
Simon Singh
#30. We could try the Turin test," said Lobsang.
"Oh, machines have been able to pass the Turing test for years."
"No, the Turin test. We both pray for an hour, and see if God can tell the difference.
Stephen Baxter
#31. 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
#32. I have such a stressful job that the only way I can get it out of my mind is by running hard.
Alan Turing
#33. 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
#34. A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.
Alan Turing
#35. So are you conscious?" The alien robot - the skin the Miller construct was using - shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. "Don't know. Seems like I'm acing my Turing test, though.
James S.A. Corey
#36. Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.
Ian McDonald
#37. His machines - soon to be called Turing machines - offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world.
Andrew Hodges
#38. 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
#39. The apple was meant to take away the bitter taste, perhaps," he said.
"I imagine that Mr. Turing wasn't exactly looking for a taste experience," said Corell.
"Man always tries to limit his suffering.
David Lagercrantz
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Programming is a skill best acquired by practice and example rather than from books.
Alan Turing
#43. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.
Gordon Brown
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
Alan Turing
#47. 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.
Neal Stephenson
#48. We all have friends we love dearly that couldn't pass for human in a strict Turing test.
Penn Jillette
#49. Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore.
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#50. Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.
Alan Turing
#51. 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.
Gordon Brown
#52. I want a permanent relationship, and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent.
Alan Turing
#53. 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
#54. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#56. What's the point in being here if you have to follow a computer? What is this, a fucking Turing test in reverse?
Ahmir Questlove Thompson
#57. Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.
Alan Turing
#58. 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
#60. We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.
Alan Turing
#61. We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing
#62. 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
#63. 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.
Neal Stephenson
#64. 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.
James Gleick
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Any [artificial intelligence] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it." - IAN MCDONALD, River of Gods It
Nick Cole
#69. 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
#70. 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.
Graham Moore
#71. 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
#72. Space camp was actually, like, the best summer of my life. It was amazing. But I thought I wanted to be a computer programmer, and among computer science folks, Turing is this object of cult-like fascination.
Graham Moore
#73. From a contradiction you may deduce everything
Janna Levin
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. - Alan Turing
Stuart Firestein
#78. 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
#79. Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.
Alan Turing
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