Innovation Trailblazer — Ada Lovelace
This is the tenth in a series of posts called “Innovation Trailblazers Revisited” that Matt Tomlinson and Crystal Collier are publishing under our Innovation Trailblazers series.
This post is in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, 13 Oct 2020 — #ALD20
Gift of Prophecy
Cassandra was the priestess cursed to utter true prophecies, but never to be believed. Innovation can often feel like this — where the item you create is so far ahead of its “time” that nobody understands its significance until much later.
The same could be said for a young countess in the 1800’s who was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron. The Countess of Lovelace actively collaborated with a fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who was working on his Analytical Engine which was an early prototype of our modern computers. Babbage’s Analytical Engine was a mechanical computer that was the first to be programmable.
While Babbage was obsessed with trying to get his machine built and working (which he never realized), Ada Lovelace spent her time thinking about the ramifications of a machine that could be configured to do any number of different tasks. Rather than just simply running calculations she saw the potential for applying logic and creating algorithms that would effectively program the machine to do something novel that had never before been attempted.
She spent her free time thinking about “poetical science” and how the analytical engine would be perceived by society. She hypothesized that people would attribute intelligence to machines they didn’t understand, which would be a mistake because the machines just execute their programs. Her vision has held true for the past 170 years, but only recently with the rise of Machine Learning (where machines start to do things they weren’t just programmed to do) can they be said to be truly intelligent.
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”
From 1842–1843, Lovelace worked carefully on seven research notes (labeled Note A through Note G) where she described algorithms that could be applied to the Analytical Engine. The most famous of which is Note G, which is considered to be the first published algorithm (to produce Bernoulli numbers) tailored for implementation on a general-purpose computer.
She was a prophet of the computer age
Ada saw the potential of the Analytical Engine and all future general-purpose computers of being able to solve problems of any complexity, any process based on logic.
The grand irony of this history is that Ada saw the machine Babbage was building more for its potential than what it actually was.
The noted historian Doron Swade wrote:
Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage’s world his engines were bound by number…What Lovelace saw…was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation — to general-purpose computation — and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper.[2]
Her notes helped shape the thinking around general-purpose computers and gave us the technology we recognize today. She saw the future, she wrote about it, but very few people believed her at the time.
This is a good story for us to tell our children, as encouragement that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) play important roles in our lives and our future.
Help us celebrate Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) and encourage young women to stay engaged in STEM!
