Ada King Countess of Lovelace

Toole did research for more than eight years, burying herself in British archives and libraries to narrate and edit this extraordinary collection of letters written by Ada Lovelace. Not only do they outline Ada's ingenuity for the sciences, but they also enlighten us on all aspects of Lady Lovelace's multidimensional life: her passionate desire to flourish in a "man's world," her battle with drug addiction and chronic sickness, and her efforts as a mother and wife. Lovelace also had a reputation as a wild gambler and a lover. Ada was one of the first to write programs of instructions for Babbage's Analytical Engines, the famous precursors to the modern digital computer. Ada's letters are some of the classic founding documents of cybernetics and computer science, written nearly a century before ENIAC.

A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron's Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers

almost 200 years later & yet the mother-daughter tension still echoes through the annals of history, my god...

madina

Ada walked a precarious line. She tried to set the boundaries of her own identity and at the same time please her mother.

Note G. & quoted by turing in his paper - of course!!!!! classic quote & we need to put this everywhere there is discussion on AI especially on how it can provide ~extraordinary feats~ - no, it is humans who taught the system how to, it is us that provide it a direction on what it needs to do.

adding Turing (p. 450): "This statement is quoted by Hartree (p. 70) who adds: “This does not imply that it may not be possible to construct electronic equipment which will ‘think for itself’, or in which, in biological terms, one could set up a conditioned reflex, which would serve as a basis for ‘learning’."

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 

 what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to 

 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 

friday, 15 november 1844. i wish you were here to see computational neuroscience &c.

I have my hopes, & very distinct ones too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations; in short a law or laws, for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain; (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world). — . . .

It does not appear to me that cerebral matter need be more unmanageable to mathematicians than sideral & planetary matters & movements, if they would but inspect it from the right point of view.

I hope to bequeath to the generations a Calculus of the Nervous System.

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers quotes

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