Alan Turing — "The value of a result is not measured by the time it took to get it."
The value of a result is not measured by the time it took to get it.
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More from Alan Turing
"The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer."
"My interest in the brain is not so much in its structure, but in its function."
"A human being is a machine for converting food into thoughts."
"Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."
"Mathematical logic, as a subject, is going to have a great future."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quality or importance of an outcome has nothing to do with how long it took to achieve. A breakthrough reached in an instant is no less valuable than one developed over years. What matters is the impact, correctness, or usefulness of the result itself — not the effort or duration of the journey. Speed and value are independent variables; judging achievement by labor-time misses the point entirely.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing cracked the Nazi Enigma cipher during WWII not through brute force but through conceptual insight and mechanical elegance. His 1936 paper on computable numbers reshaped mathematics in a single publication. He cared whether a machine could think, not how long computation took. His Turing machine work prioritized logical sufficiency over procedural labor — a result's validity and transformative power mattered above all else.
The era
The mid-20th century demanded fast, reliable results under the impossible pressure of WWII. Bletchley Park codebreakers worked against the clock — a decryption delivered hours late could cost thousands of lives. Yet postwar computing faced skeptics who dismissed machine output as inferior to human labor. Turing's era forced a reckoning: does the method — human or machine, slow or fast — define the worth of a solution?
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