Alan Turing — "The machine has a definite state at any moment, which is determined by the instr…"
The machine has a definite state at any moment, which is determined by the instructions it has received and by the results of its previous operations.
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More from Alan Turing
"The question, 'Can machines think?' should be replaced by 'Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'"
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Understanding this quote
What it means
At any given moment, a machine's current condition is entirely the product of two things: the commands it was given and the outcomes of everything it has already done. There is no randomness, no hidden influence — its present state is fully traceable to its past inputs and operations. Behavior is deterministic, predictable, and explainable through logical cause and effect.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing formalized this principle in his 1936 paper introducing the Turing machine, the theoretical foundation of modern computing. His entire career — from cracking Enigma at Bletchley Park to designing the ACE computer — depended on this deterministic logic. He believed mind and machine could be understood through formal rules, which drove his later work on machine intelligence and the Turing Test.
The era
Turing wrote during the 1930s–50s, when computing was purely theoretical and the first electronic computers were being built. World War II demonstrated that deterministic logical machines could break complex ciphers and alter history. The postwar era saw governments and scientists wrestling with what machines could and could not do — Turing's deterministic framework became the conceptual bedrock of the entire digital age.
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