Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe QUOTES

1 " Spring of 1955 found Johnny and Klári settled into a small but comfortable house in Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Johnny having made the journey from postdoctoral immigrant to a presidential appointment in just twenty-five years. The interlude in Washington promised to lead to even more productive years ahead. “I want to become independent of the regulated academic life,” von Neumann had written to Klári from Los Alamos in 1943—a goal that was finally within reach. It was not to be. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

2 " About a year or so ago, Johnny made a truly remarkable set of observations and was responsible for a completely new method of programming, "Herman Goldstine elaborated in 1949. "Johnny's scheme was to wire up what corresponds to the ENIAC's plug-boards with a fixed set of instructions that is universal to all problems." Individual instructions were assigned unique numbers - order codes - that were intelligible to "a switching center so built that upon receipt of a given number, characterizing one of the orders wired into the plug-boards, it energizes the proper board and thereby causes the order to be executed."

A sequence of orders, constituting a program, could either be entered via the ENIAC's function tables, or read from punched cards. "It is no longer necessary to stand on one's head to fit a given routine," Goldstine continued. "To prepare an individual problem the coder now merely writes out the sequence of operations, arithmetic and logical, which characterize his problem and then transliterates these into the numbers the machine will understand. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

3 " There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

4 " Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms? "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

5 " Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search—something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

6 " the politicians have inherited the stone age syndrome of the tribal chieftains, who take for granted that they can rule their people only by making them hate and fight all other tribes,” Alfvén continued. “If we have the choice of being governed by problem generating trouble makers, or by problem solvers, every sensible man of course would prefer the latter. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

7 " When the computers developed, they would take over a good deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power, "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

8 " One of the facets of extreme originality is not to regard as obvious the things that lesser minds call obvious, "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

9 " The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

10 " Monte Carlo is able to discover practical solutions to otherwise intractable problems because the most efficient search of an unmapped territory takes the form of a random walk. Today’s search engines, long descended from their ENIAC-era ancestors, still bear the imprint of their Monte Carlo origins: random search paths being accounted for, statistically, to accumulate increasingly accurate results. The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

11 " How much human life can we absorb?” answers one of Facebook’s founders, "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

12 " We want Google to be the third half of your brain,” says Google cofounder Sergey Brin. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

13 " Life, which evolved into ever more complex structures, was nature’s substitute for directly bred computers,” he wrote. “Yet it was more than a substitute: it was a road—a winding road, yet one which despite all errors and hazards, arrived at last at its destination. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

14 " In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. —Alan Turing, 1950 "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

15 " Are we using digital computers to sequence, store, and better replicate our own genetic code, thereby optimizing human beings, or are digital computers optimizing our genetic code—and our way of thinking—so that we can better assist in replicating them? "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

16 " Over long distances, it is expensive to transport structures, and inexpensive to transmit sequences. Turing machines, which by definition are structures that can be encoded as sequences, are already propagating themselves, locally, at the speed of light. The notion that one particular computer resides in one particular location at one time is obsolete. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

17 " the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

18 " algorithms with names such as BigTable, MapReduce, and Percolator are systematically converting the numerical address matrix into a content-addressable memory, effecting a transformation that constitutes the largest computation ever undertaken on planet Earth. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

19 " There is reason to suspect that our predilection for linear codes, which have a simple, almost temporal sequence, is chiefly a literary habit, corresponding to our not particularly high level of combinatorial cleverness, and that a very efficient language would probably depart from linearity,” von Neumann suggested in 1949. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

20 " That seems reasonable,” I agreed. “My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already … and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there’s a digital world—a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine—for it to colonize when it gets there. And that’s why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life.” There was a long, drawn-out pause. “Look,” Teller finally said, lowering his voice to a raspy whisper, “may I suggest that instead of explaining this, which would be hard … you write a science-fiction book about it.” “Probably someone has,” I said. “Probably,” answered Teller, “someone has not. "

― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe