"An Internet search engine is a finite-state, deterministic machine, except at those junctures where people, individually and collectively, make a nondeterministic choice as to which results are selected as meaningful and given a click. These clicks are then immediately incorporated into the state of the deterministic machine, which grows ever so incrementally more knowledgeable with every click. This is what Turing defined as an oracle machine." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"If life, by some chance, happens to have originated, and survived, elsewhere in the universe, it will have had time to explore an unfathomable diversity of forms. Those best able to survive the passage of time, adapt to changing environments, and migrate across interstellar distances will become the most widespread. A life form that assumes digital representation, for all or part of its life cycle, will be able to travel at the speed of light." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a 'clock speed', but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Life evolved, so far, by making use of the viral cloud as a source of backup copies and a way to rapidly exchange genetic code. Life may be better adapted to the digital universe than we think." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Monte Carlo is able to discover practical solutions to otherwise intractable problems because the most efficient search of an unmapped territory takes the form of a random walk. Today’s search engines, long descended from their ENIAC-era ancestors, still bear the imprint of their Monte Carlo origins: random search paths being accounted for, statistically, to accumulate increasingly accurate results. The genius of Monte Carlo - and its search-engine descendants - lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Over long distances, it is expensive to transport structures, and inexpensive to transmit sequences. Turing machines, which by definition are structures that can be encoded as sequences, are already propagating themselves, locally, at the speed of light. The notion that one particular computer resides in one particular location at one time is obsolete. (George Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search - something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"The brain is a statistical, probabilistic system, with logic and mathematics running as higher-level processes. The computer is a logical, mathematical system, upon which higher-level statistical, probabilistic systems, such as human language and intelligence, could possibly be built." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"The good news is that, as Leibniz suggested, we appear to live in the best of all possible worlds, where the computable functions make life predictable enough to be survivable, while the noncomputable functions make life (and mathematical truth) unpredictable enough to remain interesting, no matter how far computers continue to advance." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or the absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making (or erasing) a mark somewhere else." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"The genius of Monte Carlo - and its search-engine descendants - lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Where does meaning come in? If everything is assigned a number, does this diminish the meaning in the world? What Gödel (and Turing) proved is that formal systems will, sooner or later, produce meaningful statements whose truth can be proved only outside the system itself. This limitation does not confine us to a world with any less meaning. It proves, on the contrary, that we live in a world where higher meaning exists." (George B Dyson, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe", 2012)
"Nature uses digital computing for generation-to-generation information storage, combinatorics, and error correction but relies on analog computing for real-time intelligence and control." (George B Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control", 2020)
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