Alan Turing — "The machine should be able to make mistakes."
The machine should be able to make mistakes.
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More from Alan Turing
"The future of humanity depends on the development of artificial intelligence."
"The development of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on society."
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that it is a very complex machine."
"The question whether machines can think is as meaningless as the question whether submarines can swim."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A system incapable of error is merely executing fixed rules — it cannot learn, adapt, or reason. The capacity to be wrong is essential to genuine intelligence. Just as humans develop understanding by making and correcting mistakes, a truly thinking machine must be able to form incorrect hypotheses, test them, and revise. Fallibility isn't a defect to eliminate; it's a fundamental requirement for cognition.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' introduced the 'learning machine' — a child-like system trained through reward and punishment rather than pre-programmed rules. He believed rigid, error-free machines couldn't achieve real intelligence. His wartime codebreaking at Bletchley Park also required probabilistic reasoning, weighing uncertain and sometimes wrong signals to crack Enigma. Error tolerance was baked into his thinking about both computation and cognition.
The era
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, computers were valued precisely for eliminating human error — seen as deterministic calculators that followed instructions perfectly. The idea that a machine should make mistakes was heretical to engineers and mathematicians alike. As Cold War pressures demanded reliable cryptographic and military computation, Turing's insistence on machine fallibility as a path to intelligence stood sharply against the era's obsession with mechanical perfection and certainty.
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