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1 " 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. Conjectures are of great importance since they suggest useful lines of research. "
― , Alan Turing: The Enigma
2 " For him, breaking the Enigma was much easier than the problem of dealing with other people, especially with those holding power. "
3 " 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? "
4 " Is there intelligence without life? Is there mind without communication? Is there language without living? Is there thought without experience? "
5 " For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two. "
6 " Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class. "
7 " can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise? "
8 " 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. "
9 " He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination. "
10 " He called the scientific subjects ‘low cunning’, and would sniff and say, ‘This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray! "
11 " 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. "
12 " Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops in an underlying physical substrate, such as a vast network of nerve cells? If so, could something else be substituted for the nerve cells – something such as ants, giving rise to an ant colony that thinks as a whole and has an identity – that is to say, a self? Or could something else be substituted for the tiny nerve cells, such as millions of small computational units made of arrays of transistors, giving rise to an artificial neural network with a conscious mind? Or could software simulating such richly interconnected computational units be substituted, giving rise to a conventional computer (necessarily a far faster and more capacious one than we have ever seen) endowed with a mind and a soul and free will? "
13 " 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way. "
14 " Alan had become more prepared to go along with the system. It was not that he had ever rebelled, for he had only withdrawn; nor was it now a reconciliation, for he was still withdrawn. But he would take the ‘obvious duties’ as conventions rather than impositions, as long as they interfered with nothing important. "
15 " He was one of those many people without a natural sense of left and right, and he made a little red spot on his left thumb, which he called ‘the knowing spot "
16 " In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise? "
17 " Atheist, homosexual, eccentric, marathon-running English mathematician, A. M. Turing was in large part responsible not only for the concept of computers, incisive theorems about their powers, and a clear vision of the possibility of computer minds, but also for the cracking of German ciphers during the Second World War. "
18 " His machines - soon to be called Turing machines - offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world. "
19 " All this was wasted on Alan, whose set work was Hamlet. For a brief moment he pleased his father by saying that at least there was one line he liked. The pleasure was dissipated when Alan explained it was the last line: ‘Exeunt, bearing off the bodies…. "
20 " His was the other road to freedom, that of dedication to his craft. "