It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.Seth Shostak
When it comes to brains, size matters. It's not all that matters, of course. Whales and dolphins have brains that are larger than humans', but few of the flippered and fluked set win tenure at Stanford. Our brains are the largest in proportion to body size, and they're also highly sophisticated.Seth Shostak
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.Alan Turing
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.Alan Turing
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.Alan Turing
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.Alan Turing
There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent, the second good, and the third kind useless.Niccolo Machiavelli
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.Niccolo Machiavelli
