34 Quotes by Andrew Hodges

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

The point of what Einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as Alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion.

On 25 May 2011, the President of the United States, Barack Obama, speaking to the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as British contributors to science. Celebrity is an imperfect measure of significance, and politicians do not confer scientific status, but Obama’s choice signalled that public recognition of Alan Turing had attained a level very much higher than in 1983, when this book first appeared.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

But whatever these were, it was clear that here was part of Alan that was so; that part of his reality was shaped that way.

For Alan Turing did not think of himself as placed in a superior category by virtue of his brains, and only insisted upon playing what happened to be his own special part.

His machines – soon to be called Turing machines – offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world.