Ada: Enchantress of Numbers

"Ada: Enchantress of numbers"

September 1993 is the 150th anniversary of Ada Byron's, (Lady Lovelace's), description of Charles Babbage's concept of the first computer, the "Analytical Engine".

Ada was remarkable for being one of the most picturesque characters in the history of computing as well as the most prescient about the computer revolution. As Howard Rheingold wrote in his review in Whole Earth: "Her letters are some of the classic founding documents of . . .computer science written a century before ENIAC. "

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling used Ada in their science fiction novel, "The Difference Engine" as the "queen of the engines." Ada's story and her letters are a hologram, a journey through cyberspace. Her vision of the Analytical Engine has stood the test of time: she predicted its use for sound, vision, as well as its use as a practical and scientific machine.

Speaking of the programming system she develped for the mechanical computer, Ada teased in a letter to Babbage:

"No one knows what power lies yet undevelopped in that wiry system of mine."

All the excerpts that follow are from "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer" by Betty A. Toole Ed.D. published by Strawberry Press, Mill Valley, California

From Part 10 - Working Like the Devil A Fairy in Your Service What a General I Would Make An Analyst and a Metaphysician (All from 1843)

Ada gave Wheatstone, who was working with Richard Taylor, the publisher of a scientific journal, her translation of L. F. Menabrea's description of Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was published in French in a Swiss Journal in October, 1842. According to Babbage's recollection in his autobiography, Passages, many years after Ada's death, he wrote: "Some time after the appearance of his memoir [article] on the subject in the "Bibliothque Universelle de Gnve," the Countess of Lovelace informed me that she had translated the memoir of Menabrea. I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on the subject with which she was so intimately acquainted? To this Lady Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her. I then suggested that she should add notes to Menabrea's memoir: an idea which was immediately adopted.". . .

1. To Charles Babbage

Thursday Morning [1843]

Ockham

My Dear Babbage. I have read your papers over with great attention; but I want you to answer me the following question by return of post. The day I called on you, you wrote off on a scrap of paper (which I have unluckily lost), that the Difference Engine would do. . . Analytical Engine would do . . . (something else which is absolutely general).

Be kind enough to write this out properly for me; & then I think I can make some very good Notes. . .

A.A.L.

Ada started making headway with the Notes and sent some off for Babbage's inspection. As for her Note A, Babbage replied the next day: "If you are as fastidious about the acts of your friendship as you are about those of your pen, I much fear I shall equally lose your friendship and your Notes. I am very reluctant to return your admirable & philosophic Note A. Pray do not alter it . . . All this was impossible for you to know by intuition and the more I read your notes the more surprised I am at them and regret not having earlier explored so rich a vein of the noblest metal."1 Babbage continued his compliments and wrote her that Note D was in her usual "clear style." . . .

2. To Charles Babbage


Monday [10 July 1843]



Ockham

My Dear Babbage. I am working very hard for you; like the Devil in fact; (which perhaps I am).

I think you will be pleased. I have made what appear to me some very important extensions & improvements. . . .It appears to me that I am working up the Notes with much success; & that even if the book be delayed in it's [sic] publication, a week or two, in consequence, it would be worth Mr Taylor's while to wait. I will have it well & fully done; or not at all. I want to put in something about Bernoulli's Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an implicit function, may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head & hands first. Give me the necessary data & formulae.

Yours ever

A.A.L.

6. To Charles Babbage

Tuesday Morning [4 July 1843]

Ockham

My Dear Babbage. . .

In Note D, it is very well & lucidly demonstrated that every single Operation, demands the use of at least three Variable-Cards. It does not signify whether the operations be in cycles or not. . . .I enclose what I believe it ought to be. . .

Think of my having to walk, (or rather run), to the Station, in half an hour last evening; while I suppose you were feasting & flirting in luxury & ease at your dinner. It must be a very pleasant merry sort of thing to have a Fairy in one's service, mind & limbs! I envy you! I, poor little Fairy, can only get dull heavy mortals, to wait on me!

Ever Yours

A.L.

8. To Charles Babbage Wednesday, 5 July [1843]

Ockham Park

My Dear Babbage. I am much obliged by the contents of your letter, in all respects. . .,

"Why does my friend prefer imaginary roots for our friendship?" Just because she happens to have some of that very imagination which you would deny her to possess; & therefore she enjoys a little play & scope for it now & then. Besides this, I deny the Fairyism to be entirely imaginary; (& it is to the fairy similes that I suppose you allude).

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show; (if only my breathing & some other et-ceteras do not make too rapid a progress towards instead of from mortality).

Before ten years are over, the Devil's in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.

No one knows what almost awful energy & power lie yet undevelopped in that wiry little system of mine. I say awful, because you may imagine what it might be under certain circumstances.

Lord L, sometimes says "what a General1 you would make!" Fancy me in times of social & political trouble, (had worldly power, rule, & ambition been my line, which now it never could be).

A desperate spirit truly; & with a degree of deep & fathomless prudence, which is strangely at variance with the daring & the enterprise of the character, a union that would give me unlimited sway & success, in all probability.

My kingdom however is not to be a temporal one, thank Heaven! . . . "Labor ipse voluptas"2 is in very deed my motto! And, (as I hinted just now), it is perhaps well for the world that my line & ambition is over the spiritual; & that I have not taken it into my head, or lived in times & circumstances calculated to put it into my head, to deal with the sword, poison, & intrigue, in the place of x, y, & z. . .

Your Fairy for ever

A.A.L. . .

1 Ada's humorous reference to a General is prescient. The software language "Ada" was named in her honour. It was developed and is used as a standard by the U.S.Department of Defense.

2 "Labour is its own reward," was the Lovelace family motto.

3 Ohm was a German physicist (1787-1854). Ohm's law states that for any circuit the electric current is directly proportional to the voltage and inversely proportional to the resistance.

22. To Charles Babbage

Sunday, 30 July [1843]

Ockham

I am beyond measure vexed to find that instead of inserting my corrected Table in the Revise . . . they have left it exactly as it was before. Pray see about it immediately. It is exceedingly careless & annoying. . .

I do not think you possess half my forethought, & power of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike). . . .. How very careless of you to forget that Note; & how much waiting on & service you owe me, to compensate.

I am in good spirits; for I hope another year will make me really something of an Analyst. The more I study, the more irresistible do I feel my genius for it to be.

I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly.

Yours

A.L.

From Ada's description of the first computer found in part 12 of "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers":

Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

In part 11, towards the end of Ada writing this description, she and Babbage quarrelled. The reason is found in a letter on the inside of the bookcover of "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers." After the publication of the Notes, the arguments were resolved and Ada invited Babbage to Ashley Combe, her home in Somerset.

Babbage's reply to Ada's invitation was:

9 September 1843

My Dear Lady Lovelace. I find it quite in vain to wait until I have leisure so I have resolved that I will leave all other things undone and set out for Ashley taking with me papers enough to enable me to forget this world and all its' troubles and if possible its' multitudinous Charlatans every thing in short but the Enchantress of Numbers. . .

Farewell my dear and much admired Interpretess.

Evermost Truly Yours

C Babbage

The rest of her short life Ada was ill. She spent a great deal of time under the influence of laudanum, in cyberspace. She saw the need for nanotechnology: "What we need is a Newton of the molecular universe," and orbiting in cyberspace Ada saw planetary visions, and her eerie prediction of her personal destiny. The current review of "Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers," just out in the "Annals of the History of Computing" rate the book as "excellent and thoughtful" and for the reader it is a source book not only of the birth of the computer revolution, but for the imagination.

Ada The Enchantress of Numbers is published by Strawberry Press. It is a 452 page hardback with over 80 illustrations.