Ada Lovelace (1815 -1852) died at the age of 36 but had significant insights into computer science. She was the daughter of the poet Lord and Lady Byron but her parents parted only weeks after her birth. Her mother was interested in mathematics, also social movements, and established a series of schools and helped establish the University of London. It was she who ensured that Ada got a good, disciplined education in both science and mathematics.
After both attended a Babbage soiree in London, where her mother described Babbage’s engine as a ‘thinking machine’, they both went on a tour round the Midlands where they saw the Jacquard Loom. This was to inspire a series of thoughts in the form of notes from Ada on the potential of the Analytical Engine that Babbage had invented.
The mathematician Hannah Fry describes Ada as intelligent but also “manipulative and aggressive, a drug addict, a gambler and an adulteress!”
Analytical engine
Ada then collaborated closely with the mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage, who invented what some regard as the first modern computer - his Analytical Engine. This resulted in her translation from French to English, of an article written by the Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea (future Prime Minister), about Babbage's Analytical Engine, where she added extensive notes and annotations. These notes were three times as long as the original essay and were published in Scientific Memoirs Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies in 1843 and contained some seminal ideas on computing.
Programming
In these notes she described the potential for machines to perform operations beyond simple arithmetic calculations. In one of her notes, she described an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers, which is considered, by some, to be the world's first computer program, although doubt has been cast on this by recent scholarship. It is a detailed and tabulated set of sequential instructions that could be input into the Analytical Engine. This demonstrated her understanding of how machines could be programmed to perform various tasks, a fundamental concept in computer science and AI.
Insightful though her notes were, she was not a top flight mathematician and the supposed computer programme was really a sort of pseudocode with mathematical expressions. The claim that she wrote the first computer programme some regard as exaggerated and it was never executed on any machine as an actual programme. As the Babbage scholar, Doron Swade, who built the Babbage Analytical Engine, claims, the concept and principle of a computer programme for this machine was actually Babbage’s idea, as his notes of 1836/37 predate those of Lovelace, although her insights on computation beyond mathematics was absolutely original.
From calculation to computation
The notes had the idea that instructions (programs) could be given to these machines to perform a wide range of tasks, making her a pioneer in the ‘concept’ of computer programming. Accomplished in embroidery, she describes the possibility of input through punched cards similar to the method used on the Jacquard loom. This loom was invented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in the early 19th century and revolutionized the textile industry by allowing for the automated production of intricate patterns in fabrics. Punched cards were used for patterns, each hole being an on/off switch, one card per line in a column of sequenced cards, a technique used on mainframe computers in the 20th century.
Babbage saw his machines as dealing with numbers only. Lovelace saw that we could see such machines as not just doing calculation but also computation. Numbers can represent others things, representations of the world and she speculated that computers could be used to create outputs other than mathematics such as language, music and design. She understood that machines could be programmed to generate creative works. This anticipation of the creative potential of machines aligns with the field of generative AI, which focuses on developing algorithms that can produce creative content such as music, art, and literature, This was her main insight, although there is no direct causal influence between her work and these developments.
Education and learning
Her views on education aligned with her own experiences and that of her mother Lady Byron. She received an extensive education in mathematics and science, which enabled her to mix with other intellectuals and practitioners in the field, making ground-breaking insights to the field of computing. She was an advocate for the intellectual and educational development of women and believed in providing women with opportunities for education in mathematics and the sciences, which was uncommon at that time. Lovelace's passion for learning and her advocacy for education for all, regardless of gender, continue to inspire educators and learners today.
Critique
Her role in inventing either the idea of computer programming and the first computer programme seems o have been quashed. The said programme was, of course, never used in the Analytical Engine, as it was never turned into actual code and the Analytical Engine was never built.
There was no real causal influence here on modern computing, no real continuity between Lovelace and modern computing. This is an ad hoc legend rather than a matter of history. Turing read her notes and admired her insights, and although one can argue that came through Turing, who was in Bletchley Park, and that she influenced the Colossus machine, which decoded German scripts, the causal link is tenuous and unproven. There is no direct, causal trail to modern compuers, even through Babbage, as Babbage’s designs were not studied until the 1970s, so Babbage’s ideas were not actually the direct descendants of the modern computer. It was the pioneers of electronic computers in the 1940s that were the true progenitors of modern computers.
Influence
Ultimately, says Hannah Fry, her contribution was in seeing that computation was more than calculation, yet “Her work… had no tangible impact on the world whatsoever.” Nevertheless, Lovelace's passion for learning and her advocacy for education for all, regardless of gender, continue to inspire educators and learners today. The Ada Lovelace Institute in the UK is a good example of this legacy and a dozen biographies were published on the 200th anniversary of her birth in 2015.
Bibliography
Hollings, C., Martin, U. and Rice, A.C., 2018. Ada Lovelace: The making of a computer scientist (p. 2018). Oxford: Bodleian Library.
In Our Time, Ada Lovelace, featuring Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.
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