Turing Award Laureates

"Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude."

"Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. […] Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification."

"Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity he must master is arbitrary complexity […] because they were designed by different people, rather than by God."

"The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence."

"The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: […] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation."

"…the organization chart will initially reflect the first system design, which is almost surely not the right one […] as one learns, he changes the design […]. Management structures also need to be changed as the system changes…"

"How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time."

"The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. […] Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow."

"Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious."

"The "Second System Effect": An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint. As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used “next time.” Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system. This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable. The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile.""

"Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."

"Job Control Language is the worst programming language ever designed anywhere by anybody for any purpose."

"Some people have called the book the "bible of software engineering". I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it."

"…well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think."

"The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures."

"The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i.e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture,"

"Go To statement considered harmful."

"Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value."

"Programming is usually taught by examples."

"In the practical world of computing, it is rather uncommon that a program, once it performs correctly and satisfactorily, remains unchanged forever."

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."

"Experience shows that the success of a programming course critically depends on the choice of these examples."

"During the process of stepwise refinement, a notation which is natural to the problem in hand should be used as long as possible."

"Clearly, programming courses should teach methods of design and construction, and the selected examples should be such that a gradual development can be nicely demonstrated."

"But active programming consists of the design of new programs, rather than contemplation of old programs."

"As a matter of fact, the adaptability of a program to changes in its objectives (often called maintainability) and to changes in its environment (nowadays called portability) can be measured primarily in terms of the degree to which it is neatly structured."

"... we do not consider it as good engineering practice to consume a resource lavishly just because it happens to be cheap."

"Reliable and transparent programs are usually not in the interest of the designer."

"In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensable luxury, but a simple necessity."

"What is the difference between merely knowing (or remembering, or memorizing) and understanding? ...A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it — different perspectives and different associations. ...Then we can turn it around in our minds, so to speak: however it seems at the moment, we can see it another way and we never come to a full stop. In other words, we can 'think' about it. If there were only one way to represent this thing or idea, we would not call this representation thinking."

"In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe”, Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. “Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher. “So that the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened."

"... there wasn’t anyone in the Mathematics Department who was qualified to assess his dissertation, so they sent it to the mathematicians at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who, it was said, talked to God. The reply that came back was, “If this isn’t mathematics today, someday it will be,” which was good enough to earn Minsky his Ph.D."

"In his summary talk at the end of the conference The AI@50 conference (2006)], Marvin Minsky started out by saying how disappointed he was both by the talks and by where AI was going. He explained why: “You’re not working on the problem of general intelligence. You’re just working on applications.”... At the end of the dinner, the five returning members of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence made brief remarks about the conference and the future of AI. In the question and answer period, I stood up and, turning to Minsky, said: “There is a belief in the neural network community that you are the devil who was responsible for the neural network winter in the 1970s. Are you the devil?” Minsky launched into a tirade about how we didn’t understand the mathematical limitations of our networks. I interrupted him—“Dr. Minsky, I asked you a yes or no question. Are you, or are you not, the devil?” He hesitated for a moment, then shouted out, “Yes, I am the devil!”"

"The wall-to-wall media coverage of Rosenblatt and his machine irked Minsky. One reason was that although Rosenblatt 's training was in "soft science," his perceptron work was quite mathematical and quite sound--turf that Minsky, with his "hard science" Princeton mathematics PhD, didn't feel Rosenblatt belonged on. Perhaps an even greater problem was the fact that the heart of the perceptron machine was a clever motor-driven potentiometer adaptive element that had been pioneered in the world's first neurocomputer the "SNARC" which had been designed and built by Minsky several years earlier! In some ways, Minsky 's early career was like that of Darth Vader. He started out as one of the earliest pioneers in neural networks , but was then turned to the dark side of the force (AI) and became the strongest and most effective foe of his original community. This view of his career history is not unknown to him. When he was invited to give the keynote address at a large neural network conference in the late 1980s to an absolutely rapt audience he began with the words: "I am not the Devil!""

"Many people see the book as what killed neural nets, but I really don't think that's true. I think that the funding priorities, the fashions in computer science departments, had shifted the emphasis away from neural nets to the more symbolic methods of AI by the time the book came out. I think it was more that a younger generation of computer scientists who didn't know the earlier work may have used the book as justification for sticking with "straight AI" and ignoring neural nets."

"I was one of the people suffering from Minsky and Papert's book [Perceptrons] because it went roughly this way: you start telling somebody about your work, and this visitor or whoever you talk to says, "Don't you know that this area is dead?" It is something like what we experienced in the pattern recognition society when everything started to be structural and grammatical and semantic and so on. If somebody said, "I'm doing research on the statistical pattern recognition," then came this remark, "Hey, don't you know that is a dead idea already?""

"When the Minsky and Papert book came out, entitled Perceptrons... I saw they'd done some serious work here, and there was some good mathematics in this book, but I said, "My God, what a hatchet job."... I felt that they had sufficiently narrowly defined what the perceptron was, that they were able to prove that it could do practically nothing... I couldn't understand what the point of it was, why the hell they did it. But I know how long it takes to write a book. I figured that they must have gotten inspired to write that book really early on to squelch the field, to do what they could to stick pins in the balloon. But by the time the book came out, the field was already gone. There was just about nobody doing it."

"Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form."

"... invented a very simple single-layer device called a . ...Unfortunately, its influence was damped by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, who proved [in Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry (1969)] that the Perceptron architecture and learning rule could not execute the "exclusive OR" and therefore could not learn. This killed interest in Perceptrons for a number of years... It is possible to construct multilayer networks of simple units that could easily execute the exclusive OR... Minsky and Papert would have contributed more if they had produced a solution to this problem rather than beating the Perceptron to death."

"It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read."

"I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience… How would they know?"

"Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us."

"We still remain prone to doctrines, philosophies, faiths, and beliefs that spread through the populations of entire civilizations. It is hard to imagine any foolproof ways to protect ourselves from such infections. ...the best we can do is to try to educate our children to learn more skills of critical thinking and methods of scientific verification."

"Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders."

"I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced."

"Perhaps it is no accident that one meaning of the word express is "to squeeze"—for when you try to "express yourself," your language resources will have to pick and choose among the descriptions your other resources construct—and then attempt to squeeze a few of these through your tiny channels of phrases and gestures."

"We could extend them either by scaling up small connection­ist models or by combining small-scale networks into some larger organization. In the first case, we would expect to encounter theoretical obstacles to maintaining [generalized delta rule]’s effectiveness on larger, deeper nets. And despite the reputed efficacy of other alleged remedies for the deficiencies of hill-climbing, such as “annealing,” we stay with our research conjecture that no such procedures will work very well on large-scale nets, except in the case of problems that turn out to be of low order in some appropriate sense. The second alternative is to employ a variety of smaller networks rather than try to scale up a single one... No single-method learning scheme can operate efficiently for every possible task; we cannot expect any one type of machine to account for any large portion of human psychology."

"More concretely, we would call the student's atten­tion to the following considerations: 1. Multilayer machines with loops clearly open all the questions of the general theory of automata. 2. A system with no loops but with an order restriction at each layer can compute only predicates of finite order. 3. On the other hand, if there is no restriction except for the absence of loops, the monster of vacuous generality once more raises its head. The perceptron has shown itself worthy of study despite (and even because of!) its severe limitations. It has many features to attract attention: its linearity; its intriguing learning theorem; its clear paradigmatic simplicity as a kind of parallel computation. There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version. Nevertheless, we consider it to be an important research problem to elucidate (or reject) our intuitive judgment that the extension is sterile. Per­haps some powerful convergence theorem will be discovered, or some profound reason for the failure to produce an interesting “learning theorem” for the multilayered machine will be found."