Computing Machinery and Intelligence - Turing

1950

“Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would obtain the adult brain. Presumably the child-brain is something like a note-book as one buys it from the stationers. Rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets. (Mechanism and writing are from our point of view almost synonymous.) Our hope is that there is so little mechanism in the child-brain that something like it can be easily programmed. The amount of work in the education we can assume, as a first approximation, to be much the same as for the human child.” (P.456)

Turing, A. M. Page 433, 442, 451, 456-8, 460, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, LIX, no. 236, Jan. 1950, pp. 433–460., doi:10.1093/mind/lix.236.433.