Dreaming Systems: Ada

As we found out last week, algorithms can be hard work. So this week, let’s have short break and let’s spend it in the 19th century. It’s not a popular Instagram spot (yet), we’ll have our peace there.

I’d like to introduce you to a woman. She really lived. But that was a long time ago, and lasted only a short while.

Ada Lovelace, born Byron, was the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron (“The great object of life is sensation – to feel that we exist, even though in pain”).

And Ada was also the daughter of a mother who insisted that the child be educated not only in ladylike French and parlor music, but also in mathematics and the natural sciences.

At the age of thirteen, Ada designed a steam-powered flying machine.

At the age of thirty-six, she died.

Somewhere in between, she wrote the world’s first computer program - for the Analytical Engine designed by Charles Babbage, a massive mechanical calculating machine that was never fully built during either Ada’s or Babbage’s lifetime.

Ada’s algorithm was therefore never executed on the machine for which she had conceived it.

In 1950, the famous computer scientist Alan Turing still referred to “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” named after Ada: her claim that computers and their programs are fundamentally uncreative. That they can only do what we humans know how to instruct them to do:

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

Ada wrote this in her “Notes,” published in 1843 - annotations to her translation of an article by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea on Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Alan Turing took up Lady Lovelace’s Objection in his own work - but in order to argue against it. More on that in a later part of this series.

For now, we are still in the nineteenth century.

For now, it is only the human who shapes the machine, not vice versa.

But: In 1834, Ada’s mother wrote in a letter that, for Ada, the Difference Engine - Babbage’s precursor to the Analytical Engine - was like a friend.

Ada was nineteen then.

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything.

Lady Lovelace’s Objection sounds so matter-of-fact, but when we look at it again… isn’t there also a trace of disappointment in it?