TITLE: Ada Lovelace, AI Visionary AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: October 31, 2014 2:52 PM DESC: ----- BODY: We hear a lot about Ada Lovelace being the first computer programmer, but that may not be her most impressive computing first. When I read Steven Johnson's The Tech Innovators of the Victorian Age I learned that she may have been the first modern person to envision the digital computer as a vehicle for an intelligent machine. Though I have heard about Ada's work with Charles Babbage before, I didn't know any of the details. An engineer had written an essay about the Analytical Engine in Italian, and Lovelace set out to translate it into English. But she also added her own comments to the text as footnotes. It was in a footnote that she recorded "a series of elemental instruction sets that could be used to direct the calculations of the Analytical Engine". When people say Lovelace was the first computer programmer, they are referring to this footnote. Some people contend that Lovelace did not write this program; rather, Babbage had outlined some procedures and that she refined them. If that is true, then Lovelace and Babbage still conspired on a noteworthy act: they were the first people to collaborate on a program. How fitting that the first computer program was a team effort. That is only the beginning. Writes Johnson,
But her greatest contribution lay not in writing instruction sets but, rather, in envisioning a range of utility for the machine that Babbage himself had not considered. "Many persons," she wrote, "imagine that because the business of the engine is to give its results in numerical notation, the nature of its processes must consequently be arithmetical and numerical, rather than algebraical and analytical. This is an error. The engine can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or any other general symbols."
Lovelace foresaw the use of computation for symbol manipulation, analytical reasoning, and even the arts:
"Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and musical composition were susceptible of such expressions and adaptations, the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
The Analytical Engine could be used to simulate intelligent behavior. Lovelace imagined artificial intelligence. Johnson calls this perhaps the most visionary footnote in the history of print. That may be a bit over the top, but can you blame him? Most people of the 19th century could hardly conceive of the idea of a programmable computer. By the middle of the 20th century, many people understood that computers could implement arithmetic processes that would change many areas of life. But for most people, the idea of an "intelligent machine" was fantastic, not realistic. In 1956, a group of visionary scientists organized the Dartmouth conferences to brainstorm from the belief that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it". The Darmouth summer project may have been a seminal event in the history of AI. However, over a century earlier, Ada Lovelace saw the potential that a computing machine could partake in language and art. That may have been the first seminal moment in AI history. -----