David Boyle > Quotes

“He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“One of the most famous paradoxes ever articulated is often known by the title ‘the liar’s paradox’. At its simplest you can express it just by saying: ‘I am lying’. The liar’s paradox is a complicated business, discombobulating to think about because after all, if I’m lying, then my statement ‘I am lying’ must itself be a lie, unless I was actually telling the truth, in which case I would have been telling a lie.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form under the question: ‘do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written ‘No’.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Alan Turing appears to be becoming a symbol of the shift towards computing, not least because of his attitude of open-minded defiance of convention and conventional thinking. Not only did he conceptualise the modern computer – imagining a simple machine that could use different programmes – but he put his thinking into practice in the great code breaking struggle with the Nazis in World War II, and followed it up with pioneering early work in the mathematics of biology and chaos.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“out a calculation or apply an algorithm. Next,”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Perhaps this is not something that Turing, the great loner, would have done. He far preferred wrestling with problems alone and from first principles. But it meant that, when Turing returned to Bletchley in the summer of 1943, his arrival coincided with that of Newman’s Colossus machine. It had been designed partly by Tommy Flowers, an electronics engineer from Dollis Hill and it included 1,500 electronic valves. It used to catch fire and tear the printer tapes, but it worked. It was also arguably the first digital electronic computer.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“The evacuation of Boulogne as the panzers rolled in threw the weight of attention onto the fate of Calais, the next port in the way of the advancing tanks, moving along the coast from west to east. If Dunkirk was going to be held to take off even part of the BEF, then Calais would have to be held for most of that time. Orders were given to the troops fighting there that it must be held to the last round of ammunition. It was a brutal decision.  In fact, Guderian had already swept past Calais on his way to Dunkirk, leaving the defenders surrounded. Then the unexpected happened. General Ewald von Kleist ordered him to stop at the line of the canal outside Dunkirk.”
― David Boyle, Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance

“On the other hand, he did make a big step towards the practical creation of a Turing machine by proposing that the binary system should be used, once again based on the kind of punchcards”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Now that public concern had turned to what looked like public hysteria, they clearly had to be vigilant.”
― David Boyle, Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime

“Later in the war, the German naval cipher would be changed every day at midnight, and it was the duty of the night duty team to crack it before daybreak. But that was some years ahead.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“We can’t just accept it – we must doubt it. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and from inquiry we come to the truth.”
― David Boyle, Regicide: Peter Abelard and the Great Jewel

“Men wrote the Bible, but God made our consciences.”
― David Boyle, Regicide: Peter Abelard and the Great Jewel

“You shall not put people to death lazily, because of who they are.’ ‘We”
― David Boyle, Regicide: Peter Abelard and the Great Jewel

“What if there was some kind of machine capable of working out the Entscheidnugsproblem? This was the germ of the idea that eventually became a computer, but no such thing existed at the time.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Turing’s report left these questions hanging, but he did suggest a forerunner of what would eventually become the Turing Test: if you played chess against a learning machine, would you know if it was a human being or a computer?”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“As well as the fears about fifth columnists and German refugees that obsessed the nation – largely without foundation, as it turned out – there was some accurate and unnerving reporting from France. “The threat to this island grows nearer and nearer,” said the Daily Express. “While the people of Britain wait anxiously for news of their soldiers over the Channel, they must prepare for the onslaught which may come upon their own soil.”
― David Boyle, Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance

“The Turing Test never claimed to be able to verify anything metaphysical, but that is where the debate is going. It is a debate about authenticity, which asserts or denies that there are attributes which are uniquely human, not so much conventional intelligence, but love, care and generosity. Turing believed that intuition was computable. Even if a computer passes his test, we won’t know if he was right or not.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan poet once told me.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“In fact, when Admiral Godfrey took up the same job in 1939, he asked Hall for his advice, and good quality assistants with links to other areas of public life was high on his list. It was the main reason why Godfrey recruited Ian Fleming, the creator of the fictional spy James Bond. Hall’s influence is clear, though indirect, on the creation of Bond’s world.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“After the debacle of the combined allied counterattack on 21/22 May, Gort had concluded that his French allies were unravelling and he therefore had no choice but to disobey direct orders from his French commanders, and the implicit orders from London. He ordered the BEF to make all speed for Dunkirk, and he asked the commander of III Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Adam, to make arrangements for a defensive line around the beaches. It was a critical and historic decision. On the face of it, Gort was right. His decision to withdraw made the Dunkirk evacuation possible and meant that Britain could fight on, and that the war would eventually be won. But it relied on an extreme series of strokes of luck and good weather, and there is another view – because Gort’s decision also destroyed Weygand’s plan for an Anglo-French offensive.”
― David Boyle, Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance

“Sunday 26 May King George VI and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, carrying their gas masks, went to a special service in Westminster Abbey. Churchill also arrived, explaining that he could only stay for ten minutes. The government had, in their very English way, managed to avoid an official day of prayer, in case it smacked of desperation, but still knew that the churches around the nation could be relied on to pray pretty fervently. “The English are loath to expose their feelings,” wrote Churchill later, “but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.”
― David Boyle, Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance

“Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“By invoking the mob, it can also lead to a terrifying rise in tension among innocent people, or among unconventional people who love each other in different ways”
― David Boyle, Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime

“To make matters worse, the British sighted French tanks, thought they were German and attacked them. The German commander charged with the task of resisting was a man who would soon be the most famous German general of them all, then known as Major-General Erwin Rommel. By 6pm, Rommel had prevailed, the attack was over and the remaining British tanks – and most of the commanders had been killed – were in retreat”
― David Boyle, Dunkirk: A Miracle of Deliverance

“The historian Hugh Trevor Roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’. One military policeman famously mistook Bletchley for a military asylum. Turing”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Yet Enigma was a huge challenge. It looked like a typewriter, but with no space for paper. It had lights for each letter and, inside it, the three rotors (and later more than three) could be arranged in a range of different ways, each one linked to a different set of electrical connections. The key code, with the rotor setting, would be in a three letter key for each day, which all the machine operators would look up in the code book. It was believed to be impregnable. The three rotors could mean more than 17,000 different solutions for a given message, but – since the three rotors could be rearranged in any of six different ways – the number of combinations reached over 105,000.”
― David Boyle, Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma

“Political oppositions have a habit of flinging sexual allegations at those in power. There are some allegations, even today, which are so unpleasant that just to accuse someone of them almost dispenses with the need for proof”
― David Boyle, Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime

“By invoking the mob, it can also lead to a terrifying rise in tension among innocent people, or among unconventional people who love each other in different ways.”
― David Boyle, Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime

“One of the controversies about the history of Room 40 was how much the British authorities had thought about codes before 1914. They had certainly not prepared for the sheer flood of coded, intercepted signals that would pour into the Admiralty or War Office. But recent scholarship suggests that they had in fact been making preparations to intercept and, in a quiet way, attempt code-breaking, whereas before, the whole story had been reduced to an amateur series of lucky coincidences.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“vaporised thousands of people in the centre of Hiroshima, leaving their shadows scorched into the walls behind them”
― David Boyle, Lost at Sea: The story of the USS Indianapolis