The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct…
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"The future of humanity depends on the development of artificial intelligence."
"Hyperboloids of wondrous light. Rolling for age through Space and Time Harbour there Waves which somehow Might Play out God's holy pantomime."
"Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic."
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
"The process of education is an attempt to produce the kind of intelligence that we would like to have in our machines."
On mathematical intuition and ingenuity, discussed in his 1939 doctoral thesis.
Date: c. 1939
Nature & WorldFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Intuition produces snap judgments that bypass conscious, step-by-step reasoning. These gut-level conclusions can be right, but they aren't guaranteed to be — accuracy varies. Turing draws a careful empirical line: intuition is a real and valuable cognitive tool, not mere noise, yet it demands scrutiny rather than blind trust. The honest admission of fallibility distinguishes this from romanticizing intuition; it's a pragmatic acknowledgment of how the mind actually operates without formal reasoning.
Turing wrote this in 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' (1950) while exploring whether machines could think. At Bletchley Park, he cracked Enigma through both rigorous mechanical logic — the Bombe — and intuitive leaps about German operators' habits. As a mathematician, he knew conjectures often precede proofs: intuition points the way, proof confirms it. His lifelong project of formalizing thought made understanding intuition's powers and limits a central professional and philosophical concern.
Written in 1950, as the first stored-program computers emerged and critics argued machines could never truly think because they lacked intuition — a supposedly irreducible human quality. The era also saw the rise of cybernetics and early cognitive science, which attempted to model the mind mechanistically. By defining intuition precisely and noting its fallibility, Turing reframed it as potentially understandable and perhaps replicable, rather than a mystical barrier separating human minds from machines.
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