George Dyson Quotes

Trying to explain Turing's work in encryption and decryption? It's complicated.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.

Some of our best and unexpected discoveries have been born out of crises - from the Second World War, for example, came Alan Turing's decoding machine, widely considered as the precursor to modern day computers and artificial intelligence.

I had been a lifelong Alan Turing obsessive. Among incredibly nerdy teenagers, without a lot of friends, Alan Turing was always this luminary figure we'd all look up to.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.

With the advent of computing, human invention crossed a threshold into a world different from everything that came before. The computer is the universal machine almost by definition, machine-of-all-trades, capable of accomplishing or simulating just about any task that can be logically defined.

People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

Not only have computers changed the way we think, they've also discovered what makes humans think - or think we're thinking. At least enough to predict and even influence it.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

Computer Science is embarrassed by the computer.

The computer is a moron.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

Computers do the calculating to allow people to transform the world.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.

We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

The advanced arithmetical machines of the future will be electrical in nature, and they will perform at 100 times present speeds, or more., Moreover, they will be far more versatile than present commercial machines, so that they may readily be adapted for a wide variety of operations. They will be controlled by a control card or film, they will select their own data and manipulate it in accordance with the instructions thus inserted, they will perform complex arithmetical computations at exceedingly high speeds, and they will record results in such form as to be readily available for distribution or for later further manipulation.

The idea [of the Quantum Computer] is to create a machine that is as intelligence as humans, and probably much more so.