Alan Turing: Machine

Alan Turing was British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. Explore interesting quotes on machine.
Alan Turing: 66   quotes 51   likes

“These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
Context: "Can machines think?"... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"

Question , Thinking

“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 Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 442.
Source: Computing machinery and intelligence

Education , Thinking

“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 450.

“The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 451.
Context: The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles.

Spring , Falseness , Forgetting

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

Alan Turing

Source: Mechanical Intelligence: Collected Works of A.M. Turing

Question , Thinking

“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

"Proposed Electronic Calculator" (1946), a report for National Physical Laboratory, Teddington; published in A. M. Turing's ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986), edited by B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran, and in The Collected Works of A. M. Turing (1992), edited by D. C. Ince, Vol. 3.

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

Alan Turing Intelligent Machinery

"Intelligent Machinery: A Report by A. M. Turing," (Summer 1948), submitted to the National Physical Laboratory (1948) and published in Key Papers: Cybernetics, ed. C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robertson (1968) and, in variant form, in Machine Intelligence 5, ed. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1969).

Universe

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

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Thinking

“A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts: (i) Store. (ii) Executive unit. (iii) Control…. The executive unit is the part which carries out the various individual operations involved in a calculation…. It is the duty of the control to see that… [the table of] instructions are obeyed correctly and in the right order…. A typical instruction might say—"Add the number stored in position 6809 to that in 4302 and put the result back into the latter storage position." Needless to say it would not occur in the machine expressed in English. It would more likely be coded in a form such as 6809430217. Here 17 says which of various possible operations [add] is to be performed on the two numbers…. It will be noticed that the instruction takes up 10 digits and so forms one packet of information…”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Parting

“If one wants to make a machine mimic the behaviour of the human computer in some complex operation one has to ask him how it is done, and then translate the answer into the form of an instruction table. Constructing instruction tables is usually described as "programming."”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

“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 Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 436.

Idea

“We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these disabilities irrelevant.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)

Beauty , Game

“If an ɑ-machine prints two kinds of symbols, of which the first kind (called figures) consists entirely of 0 and 1 (the others being called symbols of the second kind), then the machine will be called a computing machine.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“The machine may also change the square which is being scanned, but only by shifting it one place to right or left.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

Change

“In some of the configurations in which the scanned square is blank... the machine writes down a new symbol on the scanned square: in other configurations it erases the scanned symbol.”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“The "scanned symbol" is the only one of which the machine is... "directly aware."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

However, by altering its m-configuration the machine can effectively remember some of the symbols which it has "seen" (scanned) previously.
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“The machine is supplied with a "tape" (the analogue of paper) running through it, and divided into sections (called "squares") each capable of bearing a "symbol."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)

“We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine which is only capable of a finite number of conditions q1, q2, ..., qK which will be called " m-configurations ."”

Alan Turing Computable Numbers

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)