Alan Turing — "The machine should be able to carry out logical deductions."
The machine should be able to carry out logical deductions.
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More from Alan Turing
"The extent to which we regard thinking as a function of the brain rather than the entire body is very much a matter of taste."
"The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction."
"The human mind is a self-organizing system."
"The true nature of intelligence is not to be found in the ability to solve problems, but in the ability to ask the right questions."
"Once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A computing machine shouldn't merely crunch numbers — it must be capable of following logical rules, drawing conclusions from premises, and reasoning through structured problems. This is the foundation of what we now call artificial intelligence: the idea that machines can do more than arithmetic, they can think systematically, infer outcomes, and process meaning the same way a trained human mind works through a formal argument.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's entire career embodied this principle. His 1936 paper on computable numbers established the theoretical framework for rule-following machines. At Bletchley Park, his Bombe machines performed systematic logical deductions to crack Nazi Enigma codes, saving millions of lives. His landmark 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' pushed further, asking whether machines could genuinely think — the natural endpoint of believing logic is the bridge between human and machine cognition.
The era
In the 1940s and early 1950s, computers were considered glorified calculators — useful for ballistics tables and census arithmetic, nothing more. The notion that a machine could reason was philosophically controversial; many scientists and philosophers held logic as uniquely human. Turing made this claim amid a postwar world racing to harness technology for Cold War advantage, when faster, smarter information processing suddenly had existential stakes for entire nations.
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