Alan Turing

" 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 making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings."

" 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."

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

" 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."

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

" 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."

" 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."

" 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."

" 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. "

" 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."

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

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."