#analytic engine

read more...

read more...

View On WordPress

Ada Lovelace

I am really enjoying reading James Gleick’s The Information, an ambitious history of information that spotlights and connects various practices and breakthroughs in the development and transmission of information.  Gleick starts the book with a fascinating explanation of why drummers in Sub-Saharan Africa would beat out complicated rhythms when their rhythmic packets of information often contained relatively simple messages.  By the end of the book he is in the terrain of Google, and a lot of ground is covered in between.   There are many fascinating characters in the book, but for me, one of the most intriguing is Augusta Ada Byron King, aka Ada Lovelace.  She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron, and as a preemptive measure against any madness that Ada might have inherited from her poet father, her mother encouraged her daughter to study mathematics.  She also played the harp.  But her claim to fame came from assisting Charles Babbage in the creation and promotion of his analytic engine - a steam powered, general purpose computing machine.  She is said to have written the first algorithm for the analytic engine, making her arguably the first computer programmer.  Although it seems that Babbage’s intention for the machine was mainly to do high-level math, Ada had poetic and visionary ideas about the potential of the machine, which I find inspiring: "Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent… We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." I wonder what she would have thought of future visionary, musical programmers like Laurie Spiegel.