Lovelace at 200: Celebrating the High Priestess to Babbage's machines A few of computing’s most vivid characters have become cultural icons. Most are from the last few decades, such as Steve Jobs and Alan Turing, but last month the University of Oxford held an academic symposium to mark the 200th birthday of one of the first: Ada, Countess of Lovelace, born on 10 December, 1815. Her …
Bit part? Jesus! Are you serious? Go away and research what she did - her genitals have nothing to do with it. She was a genius, and is rightly lauded for her acheivements. If her sex has been celebrated latterly, that’s just out of necessity - as a society we do need to get more women into STEM, and giving them heroines to look up to might just be a useful tool to do that.
Ada Lovelace was not only one of the very few who could understand what Babbage was on about (and presumably you believe that we should celebrate him, right?), she was also able to extend his ideas beyond anything that he had dreamed (not least looping) - to the extent that a Babbage / Ada machine (if built) would likely have been Turing Complete. Sure, it would likely also have ripped itself to pieces (steam not being the ideal power source for a computer) - but the principle was sound.
Having done all that she went on to propose a means for programming the damned thing. And you have the gall to suggest that she shouldn’t be celebrated? Seriously, dude, you have a lot to learn.
You might also want to read up on other mathematical luminaries such as Emmy Noether, Mary Lucy Cartwright, Florence Nightingale, Julia Robinson, Shafi Goldwasser, Sofia Kovalevskaya… I could go on.
I wholly agree. The lady was a major contributor in her own right. I also take grave exception to the fact that El Reg mentions Apple's former CEO in the same breath as a genius like Turin. You would have to be a totally brain dead iFanboi to believe that such a comparison was appropriate.
I would agree too. If Apple has to be mentioned for some silly reason then mention Woz as this is about programming but even that is just silly. If you want to mention the first personal computer then write about Olivetti Programma. If you want to mention the world's first programmable computer then write about the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 (1941) by Konrad Zuse. Mentioned in another comment here too.
English has become so widespread that you cannot hide any longer just tapping Anglo-American shoulders. And as you know ElReg is read in many countries to day, I like that. There was some stats about it some years ago.
As for Babbage and Lovelace, yes I fully agree.
This link was in another comment, a nice read with some good comments, (just spoiled by Jobs again).
http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/
"Go back to Return Of Kings, its comments section is far better suited to your attitudes."
Two weeks ago I wouldn't have understood that comment, but then I was looking for scholarly articles on a battle I'm researching and clicked a link.
Hoo boy. What a collection of basement dwellers.
Ada's role was to attempt to popularise Babbages invention and in attempting to do so she wrote a better exposition of it than Babbage managed to create and wrote, with support from Babbage, a more elegant and sophsiticated 'program' than those that Babbage wrote but ultimately she did nothing of significance. She invented nothing and did not create the first program. She appears to have been competent at mathematics but unlike Babbage (who was not a mathematician of note) wrote no mathematics papers or originated anything.
She was the right sex at the right time in the right technical area so she is lauded in the absence of any better women but Marie Curie would be a much better hero for contributions to science and Grace Hopper for computing. These women's contributions would be note worthy if they were men unlike Ada's.
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>>"Many people want to believe that men and women are equal not only in potential but also ability. They argue that even if there are small differences they should not be explored or explained because of the divisive effect that it has on both sexes."
Let me explain simply to you, what sexism is. Sexism is when you judge someone by their sex rather than all of their qualities as an individual. That includes pre-judging (or prejudice without the hyphen).
There are minor differences between male and female brains as I understand it. Though the differences are small enough and in fact are not even consistent across different individuals of different sexes (i.e. correlation, not causation), that any resultant impact in, for example, mathematical ability has so far been unproven.
As a result, IF there is a difference in mathematical potential between males and females, we know three things about it: One - it is small enough that it is hard to prove; two - it defines only potential (obviously) and barely anyone actually reaches their maximum potential in mathematics; three - it is vastly outweighed by social and cultural factors as evidenced by comparisons of education between different societies - both modern day nations and modern day with the past.
Given these three clear and well-supported statements about any difference in mathematical ability IF one should exist, we can with some very basic probability conclude that it is flawed to make assumptions about any given woman's mathematical ability compared to any given man's. In layspeak, if you were making some decision about someone based on if they were good at maths, and there were even a 2% difference in maximum mathematical potential between males and females which would be quite high, you would have to be an idiot to base it on their sex rather than on who they were.
To justify sexism, there would have to be staggering differences in mathematical ability between men and women - the point there could be no debate. As there is no such staggering difference, then statistically speaking being sexist only leads to unfair discrimination and an inefficient society that doesn't make best use of its resources. And, you know, is grossly offensive and stupid.
There are a number of key figures in the fields of mathematics and science that are female. And that is increasing. Where might we be if we (as a society) hadn't had so many centuries of sexism? How many Emmy Noethers never managed to overcome all the prejudice they faced?
The point of this post isn't to state that you're wrong because you're sexist, it is to show the basic flaws in being sexist. Just a little thought about how great any difference in ability would have to be to make pre-judging people based on sex a sensible thing to do, will tell you it is never a sensible thing to do and never has been.
The first person to actually write something that is recognizably a computer program is very important. She had to solve many logical and algorithmic problems on her own. There were no books because no one had done it before. Even her accomplishments were forgotten and rediscovered she was the first.
Very nice write-up.
She is an icon all right, but she is reinstated to that status by us. Today. In reality she did _NOT_ leave a trail in science or technology. She was promptly forgotten for 100 years. We have recovered her "trail" after we rediscovered most of what she did once more in the 20th century. However, for most of that it was recovered after we rediscovered it and was of little use to advance science and technology to rediscover it.
I know I will get modded down by zealots, but for me Sophie Kovalevskaya and Marie Curie are way ahead of her in the icon list.
They did not just drive battering rams through what is mostly male professions till this day (math and physics), they also left a trail. What they did was followed immediately and used for advancement of technology, including computers - we would not have semiconductors if we did not understand the structure of the atom and we would not have been able to do that if we did not do partial diff equations.
Well yes, you have a point. What Lovelace did was way ahead of her time, but sadly forgotten, and was not used as the basis for other work. Without her, the field of computer science would be no better or worse off. Which is a shame. It doesn't take away from her her genius though. Nor does her vagina, or associated parts.
She is an icon all right, but she is reinstated to that status by us. Today. In reality she did _NOT_ leave a trail in science or technology. She was promptly forgotten for 100 years.
Yes, because the society of her time very rarely recognised the intellectual achievements of women. Thankfully we've moved on since then. A bit.
Hardly forgotten for a a 100 years. Simply 100 years ahead of the curve for general appreciation. That she was rediscovered only after the work had been done from scratch simply shows how good she was.
Computer programs need computers. Until practical computers existed computer programming was as useless as prime number stuff but with even less scope for intellectual fun.
Prime number factorization dates back to Gauss and had damn all use until there were practical computers. However it wasn't forgotten because math types can do shit for fun with paper and pencil :-)
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Mary Shelly was writing practically the first SF , Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus when Ada was a baby...
First Scientist & Electricity in fiction? (Volta invented Electric battery in about 1799 and wrote refutation of Galvanism, or Animal Electricity, such which was obviously an idea for animating the monster.).
It's a great pity that Babbage chose the mechanical calculator route rather than electrical relays, which would have been possible. (c.f. Conrad Zuse and Z1). The Babbage design wasn't really manufacturable with the machine tools of the time.
In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumour that was to kill her at the age of 53.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#Authorship_of_Frankenstein
Having looked at the internet.
If he had trouble with his piles initially, the answer was soaking them in brine.
Napoleon heard about it and got Volta to show them to him. Napoleon also said that Volta was a count. (Which sounds a bit harsh.)
Must get new glasses....
"It's a great pity that Babbage chose the mechanical calculator route rather than electrical relays, which would have been possible."
I don't think so. The problems would have been wire making technology (wire could be drawn but insulation was a real problem) and reliable contacts. The first relays were pretty big and very expensive and were used as amplifiers for the electric telegraph. Even had Babbage known about them, they would have been far too big, expensive and power hungry - and unreliable - to build a Difference Engine.
Yes, indeed.
On two occasions I have been asked, -- "Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher by Charles Babbage, p.67
Given that Peel had supported Babbage to start on the engine in 1822, and it was 9 years after the project had ground to a halt when Babbage was bothering him about getting it finished, you can understand that - as Prime Minister of the day - higher priorities (war in Afghanstan, and South Africa, stopping children working down mines), a bad briefing by a non-sympathizer and Babbages undiplomatic manner might gave queered the pitch.
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/robertpeel/
--- a bad briefing by a non-sympathizer ---
Begins to scratch the surface of the antipathy that Airy expressed about mechanical computing. I therefore found it amusing that the first "production" program run on EDSAC was a computation of the Airy Integral. I'd like to think that Maurice Wilkes had a sense of humor that contributed to that choice.
I found a copy of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage under the Christmas tree - it's a lovely book, and chock full of informative annotations.
I think that are Jaquard cards. (The mother od all punch cards, and still in use today. Babbage knew them and wanted to use them for his machine.) Apart from that I completely agree. And am thankful for the opportunity to indulge my pedantic side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
Yes, "did not have educational access equal to that of the men of her time of comparable intellect” does seem a bit of an odd comment about a time when half the population were illiterate, and the 70 hour working week was commonplace. She was smart enough to have a wealthy mother, but I suspect there may have been other women of similar intellect in the nineteenth century who didn't pursue mathematics as a full-time hobby because they were too busy trying to prevent themselves and their families from starving to death.
"Most are from the last few decades, such as Steve Jobs and Alan Turing"
Turing was born just over a century ago, and died sixty-odd years ago. If one measures computing from (say) Pascal to Wirth, I guess that is the last few decades. But how much of the commentariat here was born before Turing died. Not many, I suppose.
remind me again on the truly amazing item that Jobs designed and built in his shed?
Babbage and Lovelace designed (not built but could have and ironed out the bugs)
Turing designed and helped build
Jobs thought of an idea and got Ive's to design the Chinese to build
Jobs in this context is about as welcome as Tony Blair in the peace talks in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan
I wasn't. But in the mid-1980ies I worked with a colleague who had been working on a Zuse in the late 1950ies/early 1960ies. Taught me how to program a Tectronics graphic computer (I forget the name, but they were used in the original Battlestar Galactica movie as props.)
I don't remember Tectronics (wasn't it Tektronix?) as a computer, but I certainly worked with a Tektronix graphics display terminal from 1986-1990. I can't remember the resolution (about the same as the few other terminals we had, maybe 400x300) but it had the unique advantage of being able to display pixels in 16 colours instead of just green or amber! I wrote a rather limited driver for it, just in case anyone wanted their raster graphics in magenta rather than green...
Visionary, yes, but Babbage's ideas came faster than it was possible to realise them...and that's what killed his projects, the inability to deliver. He didn't understand that, to keep his funding, he needed to deliver. Or, maybe he just wasn't very good at setting his customer's expectations.
Lovelace, on the other hand, was dealing with software. Much easier to deliver (even if it doesn't work to spec). She had the easier job -- writing papers.
If you ever have a chance to see one of the two Difference Engine recreations run, take it! It's absolutely mesmerizing. The scale is impressive, as are all the shiny bits, but the rotation of the spiral carry propagation shafts is sheer poetry in motion.
Moreover—as Turing goes on to point out—there are many ways in which even digital computers do things that take us by surprise; more needs to be said to make clear exactly what the nature of this suggestion is. (Yes, we might suppose, digital computers are “constrained” by their programs: they can't do anything that is not permitted by the programs that they have. …. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/#LadLovObj
The nature of this suggestions is that digital and magical qubits are an enterprising zone in myriad enterprise zones with Command and Control of Virtual RealIT Feeds … with Source in Immaculately Resourced Assets of Universal Virtual Force.
QuITe Heavenly Fodder for Real Virtual Machinery.
Any advance on them BRMly MetaType Apples, @HeadUKCivServ @OECDgov?
CyberIntelAIgent Command Endearing Controls are interesting to know.
At times like these, and in times with those, am I minded of “Oh what a wondrous web we weave, when first one perfects AI Conception with Real Creational Remote Control of both Practically and Virtually Everything and/or Anything [we practise to conceive]”, and its devilchild bastard twin, “Oh what a wicked web we weave, when first we practise to deceive”
Are you ready for what is coming, El Reg? A Veritable Helter Skelter of AIMagical Rides. Perfectly Divine Programs with Divine Programming ProVision for Immaculate Sees with Virtual Remote Control Visions under Grand AIMaster Controlling Command.
If mental states are functional states—and if mental states are capable of realisation in vastly different kinds of materials—then there is some reason to think that it is an empirical question whether minds can be realised in digital computing machines. Of course, this kind of suggestion is open to challenge; …… http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/#LadLovObj
Surely it is open to realisation and virtualisation. What then would be the challenge?
Do you imagine choice being freely available from virtual machines/analytical engines/discrete continuous-state machines? Hmmm…. Novel and Beautifully Dangerous and Exciting too.
Aspects of your questions have been discussed by John Conway and Simon Kochen, who argue that if we have free will then so too in some measure do elementary particles.
The Free Will Theorem:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079
The Strong Free Will Theorem:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3286
If realisation and virtualisation are challenges overcome and future programming processes made eerily available/remotely self-actualised by smarter elementary particles and cosmic agents, will second and third party free choice be a mere quantum mechanical illusion and communicated delusion presenting to such parties, resulting in a corrupted virtual reality production ……. perverse bigger picture show and easily rigged Great Game Play with Toxic Virtual Terrain Team Traps …… Mad Areas of Detention where rapid progress is denied for lack of free will implementation ability/facility …… mindful selfless sharing of quantum communications protocols for pure processing of …… well, Immaculate Futures with Global Operating Devices would trade Perfect Enough Source to MarketMaker and FutureBuilder types, if filthy lucre be one object and subject of such a Great AI Game Play. And in all of those sorts of cases, is the mind one would be engaged to and playing with, be a mechanical device and virtual machine or live being of smarter extraction or is the real truth IT be at least all three?
Shall we prove it and proof IT?
And thanks, David Pollard, for the Cornell University Library references.
And just whenever you were thinking, “What a lode of nonsense” …… one really does need to consider the worth and value in ……
Andy Haldane, the Bank’s chief economist, has said that he “dreams of the day when I am made redundant by a robot”, referring to the possibility that the MPC could be replaced by a simple rule for monetary policy. …. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/bank-of-england/12092171/Scrap-Bank-of-Englands-powers-after-century-of-boom-and-bust-says-think-tank.html
cc Bank of England [@bankofengland]/Mark Carney/Alan Haldane/Monetary Policy Committee
Given that I am a descendant of Lord Byron and Percy Shelly (Mary Shelly is a cousin a couple of levels in the family tree away), I guess that I am both a cousin of Frankenstein, as well as cousin to Lady Lovelace... That's probably where my writing, computing, and software skills come from. :-) Thank you ladies!
For those of us who are still terribly childish, could I ask you to support the Lego Difference Engine? You'll be able to bung a Pi in there.
https://ideas.lego.com/projects/102740
of course it does not quite get to http://acarol.woz.org - but then we have all done one of those, just pre 3-d printer, no Babbage or Lovelace :-)
Apologies to everyone else, normal service resumed.
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