4.3 KiB
4.3 KiB
Ada Lovelace Contribution Notes [2024-01-31 Wed 15:17]
- For a group project detailing an important person in Computer Science history
- Based upon Stephen Wolfram's writing found here
Analytical Engine while she was alive
- Babbage never published serious account of Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine
- Babbage talked about the Analytical Engine in Turin in 1840 and a man named Luigi Menabrea took notes of his lecture
- Menabrea went on to publish the paper in French in 1842
- Ada saw the paper and chose to translate it to English and submit it to a British publication in 1843
- Ada took extensive notes of her own to add to the translation, the notes ended up being longer than the translation itself
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Ada exchanged many letters with Babbage, she felt she was explaining Babbage's work, not discovering something
- She only wanted to validate things with Babbage, got annoyed when Babbage tried to make his own corrections to her manuscript
- She originally wasn't going to sign the translation or notes, she was convinced to do so by William King (her husband)
- Signed it "AAL"
- Saw herself primarily as an interpreter of Babbage's work
- Finished notes and translation at the end of July 1843
- Wrote to Babbage asking for him to join in bringing the Analytical Engine to fruition with her as a sort of CEO after writing her translation — she seemingly became wholly enraptured by the machine
- Unfortunately for Ada her health began failing her and the Analytical Engine had to be sidelined
- She died of cancer in November 27, 1852 at the age of 36
Rediscovery of Her Work After Death
- In 1953 Bertram Bowden rediscovered Ada's work
- Researching for his book Faster than Thought about computer he came across Ada's granddaughter who told him about Ada and showed him some of Ada's papers
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As more research was done difference engines and mechanical computer's were researched and inevitably so too was Babbage's Analytical Engine
- Remember, Babbage's Analytical Engine's primary source was Ada's translation and notes she wrote about it
Why is Ada important?
- Ada had some thoughts of what the Analytical Engine should be capable of — namely general computation
- She asked Babbage many times on how to achieve this general computation and distilled his likely extremely detailed answers to a clear explanation of the operation of the Analytical Machine
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She actually published and simplified ideas about the Analytical Engine — something that Babbage never did
- If you scream and nothing hears it, did you really scream?
- Ada had a more developed abstract understanding of the Analytical Machine than Babbage possessed due to her work in creating her notes and translation about the Analytical Engine
- Due to this more developed abstract understanding, she had ideas of general/universal computation which are the hallmark of modern day computers
- Babbage only saw the Analytical Engine as a more efficient way of producing mathematical tables and just so happened to design a universal computer
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When writing about the Analytical Engine, Ada was trying to explain it as clearly as possible
- To do this she had to look at the machine in a more abstract sense and this resulted in her seeing the machine as a gateway to universal computation
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She was seemingly the first recorded person to have ideas of universal computation in regards to machines
- This is the most important element, the entirety of the modern world are built on the back of universal computation
Is it possible Ada could have discovered modern computing had her health not failed?
- It's not far-fetched to say that if Ada had not died so early of cancer she likely would have played a major role in a mechanical machine capable of universal computation
- After creating the machine it's not a stretch at all that she might then create a new machine (or perhaps even the first machine) as an electromechanical device and thus being much closer to modern computers
- She and had a friend working with electronic communications, Charles Wheatstone who was involved with the creation of the electric telegraph
- Ideas around Binary were beginning to show up around Ada's time, but it wasn't well known