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.
If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
It's paradoxical that things that are hard for people are easy for the computer, and things that are hard for the computer, any child can understand.
Math is a language that you use to describe statistics, but really it's about collecting information and putting it in an order that makes sense.
I became interested in AI in high school because I read 'Goedel, Escher, Bach,' a book by Douglas Hofstader. He showed how all their work in some ways fit together, and he talked about artificial intelligence. I thought 'Wow, this is what I want to be doing.'
If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.
The computer is not, in our opinion, a good model of the mind, but it is as the trumpet is to the orchestra - you really need it. And so, we have very massive simulations in computers because the problem is, of course, very complex.
A programming language is a tool that has profound influence on our thinking habits.
Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.
The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.
Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.
Women are both talented and innovative thinkers and tend to use computer science as a tool to solve larger problems.
The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.
Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
It would be very discouraging if somewhere down the line you could ask a computer if the Riemann hypothesis is correct and it said, 'Yes, it is true, but you won't be able to understand the proof.'
Building Oracle is like doing math puzzles as a kid.
I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.
What is the central core of the subject [computer science]? What is it that distinguishes it from the separate subjects with which it is related? What is the linking thread which gathers these disparate branches into a single discipline. My answer to these questions is simple -it is the art of programming a computer. It is the art of designing efficient and elegant methods of getting a computer to solve problems, theoretical or practical, small or large, simple or complex. It is the art of translating this design into an effective and accurate computer program.
Over the centuries, monumental upheavals in science have emerged time and again from following the leads set out by mathematics.
Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.
To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.
Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.
