Remembering Ada
Written by martyndavies on Mar 24, 2009 - 10:35 AM
Ada Lovelace was born into a privileged life as the daughter of Lord Byron, and then later she married into wealth with her husband William King, who became the first Lord Lovelace. She certainly enjoyed some of the vices of the upper classes, notably excessive gambling, but also drink and drugs. However, unlike many of her class she did not live a life of indolence but in fact worked hard and used her many talents, as it turns out with long-lasting contributions to science and technology.
Ada is associated with Charles Babbage, who was a pivotal figure in the invention of the automatic computer. Today you get "hardware" people and "software" people, and in a way so it was then; Babbage was very much into mechanical engineering, and spent literal fortunes creating the Difference Engine and planning his later Analytical Engine. Ada had no hardware to work with, since the Analytical Engine was never built, so she worked entirely with a theoretical model of the computer, imagining how to create the steps to solve a mathematical problem, in other words, a computer program.
Ada’s involvement with the Analytical Engine began with a memoir written by Italian mathematician, Luigi Menebrea. Menebrea had written up details of the Babbage engines, in French, and Ada took on the task of translating the paper into English. Ultimately, the notes she added to the book ended up being bigger than the book itself, and it is this work that allows her to claim the title of the world’s first computer programmer. In the notes she created a set of steps, or an algorithm as we might say today, that would create the numbers of a Bernoulli series. Recently a copy of this book, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" by Menebrea, with added notes by Ada, "Observations on Mr. Babbage’s Analytical Engine", was sold at auction for $170,000, a testament to its importance as a historic scientific book. Menebrea later went on to be Italian Prime-Minister, a rare case even still of a top politician coming from a scientific background. In a different social climate, one might have hoped for Ada to be a prime-minister, but in those days even to publish a book was not looked on favourably for a woman.
Her insight into the possibilities of a computer were extraordinary. She explained the Analytical Engine in this way: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.", making the link between the Jacquard loom (a mechanical system using cards to program a loom to weave) to the more general case of solving mathematical problems. She is also attributed with being the first one to state that a computer does not have creativity, but rather follows steps laid out for it: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." This simple statement is referred to as "Lady Lovelace’s Objection" and still stirs the question today "can computers think?" It informed computer pioneer Alan Turing to describe what is now called the "Turing Test"; a kind of blind test to see whether a human interacting with a computer can be fooled into thinking that actually they are communicating with a human. It is very difficult for a computer to convincingly pretend to be a human, because we can do so much more than simply blindly following patterns. Digital computers are faster than mechanical ones, but the essence of how they work is still the same.
Babbage himself was a man beaten down by failure and ridiculed by politicians and commentators at the time. His friendship with Ada, and the encouragement and intellectual horsepower she brought to the project must have been a key factor in him pressing on, against all odds. Babbage affectionately used the term "Enchantress of Numbers" of Ada, and she is often referred to as the "Queen of Engines".
Ada Lovelace has rarely been immortalized in fiction, but one attempt was in the 1990 novel "The Difference Engine". The central conceit of the book is that the Difference Engine (or perhaps that should have been the Analytical Engine?) has successfully been built and commoditized, and so a computer age has happened in the mid-1850s. These commodity computers are then used by the state for control purposes (for example all citizens have an ID card; shades of 2009), and computer programs can do untold harm if they fall into the wrong hands. The timeline of the novel requires Ada to still be alive by 1855, where sadly in real life she died in 1852. The novel plays up her vice of gambling, and yet also creates a world where Ada is famous, and venerated in her time as an extraordinary scientist and visionary, rather like the modern cult of the veneration of Steve Jobs.
You can’t call it a well researched novel; for example it has one character joking that she will fling herself off Tower Bridge in London, a crossing that isn’t due to be built for another thirty years. However, the idea of computers revolutionising industry and society isn’t so crazy, as we know. Babbage did have plans to drive the Analytical Engine with steam (rather than the hand-cranked Difference Engine), so with the appropriate technology of the age perhaps a breakthrough could have occurred. Had Ada lived to 60, and Babbage had had more luck with funding from visionary politicians, perhaps a computing revolution could have happened in the age of steam?
But what of the software industry, that perhaps Ada created? Programming languages have proliferated; millions of programmers have been trained, and really the variety and complexity of software has now spun out of control. The United States Department of Defense (DoD) realized that this was a problem needing a solution, and so in the 1970s set out to define the software language to end all languages. The ADA programming language, was designed in a characteristically long public sector project through the 1970s and 80s. The DoD commissioned and examined four different potential languages before choosing a winner, that would be used for all military applications from then on. Ultimately, the project cannot be seen as a long-term success and ADA is today not an important commercial language, having been outpaced by later developments like "C" and Java. However, the name "ADA" is an important tribute to the world’s first programmer, Ada Lovelace.
Ada’s life was short: she died at the age of only 36 from cancer of the uterus, leaving behind a husband and three children. In that short life, she profoundly affected the history of computing, inspiring a generation of scientists like Boole and Scheutz to create the framework that would eventually, after another century, create the electronic computer.
The consequent pace of change in computing in the last 60 years has been breathtaking. From the first valve-based general-purpose computers in the 1940s to the crippled 8K machines that navigated men to the moon in 1969, through to today’s pocket computers, the smartphone and mp3 music player. Perhaps the USB flash drive in your pocket contains as much computer storage that existed in the whole world in 1970?
The pace of innovation is impossible to imagine, and we continue to fail to imagine. IBM founder Thomas J. Watson imagined "a world market for maybe five computers", then later Ken Olsen of the now defunct DEC minicomputer company said "there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home". By contrast, Ada Lovelace was someone with the imagination to see the potential of a machine that would never be built in her lifetime; even in her century, and this is a rare gift indeed.
This piece is a contribution to Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the role of women in our technology business. See http://findingada.com/
Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09 #ALD09
Ada is associated with Charles Babbage, who was a pivotal figure in the invention of the automatic computer. Today you get "hardware" people and "software" people, and in a way so it was then; Babbage was very much into mechanical engineering, and spent literal fortunes creating the Difference Engine and planning his later Analytical Engine. Ada had no hardware to work with, since the Analytical Engine was never built, so she worked entirely with a theoretical model of the computer, imagining how to create the steps to solve a mathematical problem, in other words, a computer program.
Ada’s involvement with the Analytical Engine began with a memoir written by Italian mathematician, Luigi Menebrea. Menebrea had written up details of the Babbage engines, in French, and Ada took on the task of translating the paper into English. Ultimately, the notes she added to the book ended up being bigger than the book itself, and it is this work that allows her to claim the title of the world’s first computer programmer. In the notes she created a set of steps, or an algorithm as we might say today, that would create the numbers of a Bernoulli series. Recently a copy of this book, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" by Menebrea, with added notes by Ada, "Observations on Mr. Babbage’s Analytical Engine", was sold at auction for $170,000, a testament to its importance as a historic scientific book. Menebrea later went on to be Italian Prime-Minister, a rare case even still of a top politician coming from a scientific background. In a different social climate, one might have hoped for Ada to be a prime-minister, but in those days even to publish a book was not looked on favourably for a woman.
Her insight into the possibilities of a computer were extraordinary. She explained the Analytical Engine in this way: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.", making the link between the Jacquard loom (a mechanical system using cards to program a loom to weave) to the more general case of solving mathematical problems. She is also attributed with being the first one to state that a computer does not have creativity, but rather follows steps laid out for it: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." This simple statement is referred to as "Lady Lovelace’s Objection" and still stirs the question today "can computers think?" It informed computer pioneer Alan Turing to describe what is now called the "Turing Test"; a kind of blind test to see whether a human interacting with a computer can be fooled into thinking that actually they are communicating with a human. It is very difficult for a computer to convincingly pretend to be a human, because we can do so much more than simply blindly following patterns. Digital computers are faster than mechanical ones, but the essence of how they work is still the same.
Babbage himself was a man beaten down by failure and ridiculed by politicians and commentators at the time. His friendship with Ada, and the encouragement and intellectual horsepower she brought to the project must have been a key factor in him pressing on, against all odds. Babbage affectionately used the term "Enchantress of Numbers" of Ada, and she is often referred to as the "Queen of Engines".
Ada Lovelace has rarely been immortalized in fiction, but one attempt was in the 1990 novel "The Difference Engine". The central conceit of the book is that the Difference Engine (or perhaps that should have been the Analytical Engine?) has successfully been built and commoditized, and so a computer age has happened in the mid-1850s. These commodity computers are then used by the state for control purposes (for example all citizens have an ID card; shades of 2009), and computer programs can do untold harm if they fall into the wrong hands. The timeline of the novel requires Ada to still be alive by 1855, where sadly in real life she died in 1852. The novel plays up her vice of gambling, and yet also creates a world where Ada is famous, and venerated in her time as an extraordinary scientist and visionary, rather like the modern cult of the veneration of Steve Jobs.
You can’t call it a well researched novel; for example it has one character joking that she will fling herself off Tower Bridge in London, a crossing that isn’t due to be built for another thirty years. However, the idea of computers revolutionising industry and society isn’t so crazy, as we know. Babbage did have plans to drive the Analytical Engine with steam (rather than the hand-cranked Difference Engine), so with the appropriate technology of the age perhaps a breakthrough could have occurred. Had Ada lived to 60, and Babbage had had more luck with funding from visionary politicians, perhaps a computing revolution could have happened in the age of steam?
But what of the software industry, that perhaps Ada created? Programming languages have proliferated; millions of programmers have been trained, and really the variety and complexity of software has now spun out of control. The United States Department of Defense (DoD) realized that this was a problem needing a solution, and so in the 1970s set out to define the software language to end all languages. The ADA programming language, was designed in a characteristically long public sector project through the 1970s and 80s. The DoD commissioned and examined four different potential languages before choosing a winner, that would be used for all military applications from then on. Ultimately, the project cannot be seen as a long-term success and ADA is today not an important commercial language, having been outpaced by later developments like "C" and Java. However, the name "ADA" is an important tribute to the world’s first programmer, Ada Lovelace.
Ada’s life was short: she died at the age of only 36 from cancer of the uterus, leaving behind a husband and three children. In that short life, she profoundly affected the history of computing, inspiring a generation of scientists like Boole and Scheutz to create the framework that would eventually, after another century, create the electronic computer.
The consequent pace of change in computing in the last 60 years has been breathtaking. From the first valve-based general-purpose computers in the 1940s to the crippled 8K machines that navigated men to the moon in 1969, through to today’s pocket computers, the smartphone and mp3 music player. Perhaps the USB flash drive in your pocket contains as much computer storage that existed in the whole world in 1970?
The pace of innovation is impossible to imagine, and we continue to fail to imagine. IBM founder Thomas J. Watson imagined "a world market for maybe five computers", then later Ken Olsen of the now defunct DEC minicomputer company said "there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home". By contrast, Ada Lovelace was someone with the imagination to see the potential of a machine that would never be built in her lifetime; even in her century, and this is a rare gift indeed.
This piece is a contribution to Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the role of women in our technology business. See http://findingada.com/
Tags: AdaLovelaceDay09 #ALD09
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