Ada Lovelace

by

Shawn Stoffer

Computer Science 451

University of New Mexico

Fall 1999

In researching Ada Lovelace, I found that more than anything else most of the sources presented conflicting stories of pieces of her life. Major events in her life are often the same, but dates are often confused. Because of this some of the information I found about her I left out of this paper due to excessive conflicting information in several sources.

Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10th of the year 1815, in London. She was the daughter of the rather well known poet, Lord Byron and Anabelle Milbanke Byron.

She turned out to be much like her father though. She died at the age of thirty-six, like her father, was prone to bursts of energy, and had poetic tendencies, which she related to her mother later in her life. Though she was not to be with her father throughout her life, and in fact never got to know her father at all. Her father, had had been accused of taking his half-sister to be his mistress, and the controversy surrounding this ended his marriage to Ada’s mother, less than 5 weeks after Ada had been born. Her mother apparently did not want her daughter to turn out like her father, and therefore taught her disdain for her artistic talents, and instead nurtured her mathematical and scientific abilities. To further subdue her daughter’s non-conforming ideas, she fed Ada a laudanum-laced tonic, which created an addiction, and most likely did not help the illnesses which plagued Ada’s life (Rheingold, 1985).

She was raised in the aristocratic society of England, and because of this attended the theater, concerts, aristocratic parties. At one of these parties she was introduced to Charles Babbage, demonstrating a model of his Difference Engine, she later worked heavily with this man. Continuing in Aristocratic circles though, she married Lord William King, to whom she was introduced by a fellow mathematician, Mary Sommerville. Lord King soon became Earl of Lovelace, and she Countess of Lovelace, after they were married, and she had three children by him. Lord King was a mathematician as well, but was reportedly not as good as Ada. This is not necessarily surprizing though, as one of her mathematics tutors when she was a child was Augustus de Morgan, a mathematician who is well known even now.

She is often regarded as the first computer programmer, by helping to develop a machine thought of by Charles Babbage, which she helped him to develop, though sadly was not finished within her, or even his lifetime. This story though is not necessarily true, as a few of my sources related, that Babbage, having designed the machine in the first place would no doubt have already written some programs for his Analytical Engine, before Ada. This is inconsequential except to those who care that someone have done something first. The entire issue is eclipsed by the fact that Ada Lovelace was a very good mathematician and further intelligent enough to understand the potential of Charles Babbage’s ideas at the first demonstration of the Difference Engine, where she met Charles Babbage and spoke to him at length about the Engine. Babbage noted after this meeting that "She seems to understand it better than I do, and is far, far better at explaining it."(Rheingold, 1985)

Throughout her life she worked with Babbage significantly and helped him with his designs for the Analytical Engine. Her understanding of the Analytical Engine was shown again after a presentation made by Babbage in Italy. Count Menabrea took extensive notes and published them in Paris. Ada then translated these notes from French to English and added an addendum to the notes, including footnotes and other explanations, which ended up being twice to three times the length of the original paper (depending upon which source you look at for this information). These additional notes were said to have been the best accounts of the Engine and Babbage’s views (The Babbage Pages, 1996). She signed these papers as A.A.L, and depending on which accounts you read it is either because of modesty or the desire to not have it known that she was a female. This though is not what she is best known for.

She is best known for the contribution she made to programming. It is reported that while she was interested in the contribution to math that the Analytical Engine would provide, automation of "laborious calculations"(Rheingold, 1985), this was not her primary interest. She was primarily interested in the ideas behind programming this Engine. She reportedly sometimes referred to the "sequences of instructions"(Rheingold, 1985) as language. She further is reported to have thought about and used loops, subroutines, and jumps in her programming. Programming was done by the use of Punched Cards, which was taken from Jacquard, who used them for automating weaving via a loom. These cards were normally executed in order. This approach was modified by Ada to allow for a looping behavior similar to an unconditional jump. The cards were executed in order until the loop instruction was encountered, and then the Engine would sort back through the cards, until the proper card was selected, when the Engine would again begin executing normally. The idea of subroutines was never expounded upon in my sources, other than the idea of writing a set of instructions, as a library, which could then be used for that operation from that point on. The details though, are never revealed. The idea of a conditional jump is similar in that account, though one could easily discern that the way of doing that would be if a condition were true then simply cycle, so many, cards forward without executing them and then continue executing.(Rheingold, 1985) She used these programming techniques to write programs for the Analytical Engine (which was not yet complete, and would not be complete while she lived). One of the programs she wrote using these techniques was a program to compute Bernoulli numbers (Beach, 1996).

Ada Lovelace, as many of the mathematicians who dealt with computation did then, chose to speak her mind on the subject of artificial intelligence. She reasoned that the Analytical Engine would never be capable of originating anything, and therefore could not achieve intelligence. Though her reasoning goes on to say that the Engine could only do what it was programmed to do, whatever someone knew how to order it to behave.(Rheingold, 1985)

This seems to indicate that she believed that intelligence was defined as being able to originate some action or thought. Were this the case though, many creatures on earth could not be said to be intelligent, and even humans often could be said to be unintelligent. Further it has been said throughout history that any being is only the product of his or her environment. This argument has often been argued throughout history, but generally in the study of Psychology. This argument can be seen through without much thought, that even a human is entirely the product of his or her environment, and this is why the current study of Psychology is moving in other directions than behaviorism. It cannot, however, be ruled out that this is at least partially true, and therefore at least some of the time, even humans behave in an unintelligent manner. Therefore modifying the above statement to be more correct would yield: In many situations and many circumstances, any being is the product of his or her environment. This statement alone would be enough to make us seriously reconsider Lady Lovelace’s statement about intelligence, which seems to indicate a separation of the origin of behavior from the environment, almost to a more exclusive type of arrangement (where behavior is produced independent of the environment).

Throughout her life, her work, and Babbage’s work, on the Analytical Engine was interrupted due to money making ventures, which came to occupy more and more of her time as she got older, and her gambling debts got to be larger and larger. At the beginning of her marriage her husband joined her in gambling on horses, but after taking significant losses from this, he discontinued his gambling exploits. She continued, secretly, gambling on horses, and included Babbage in these, so he could help her develop a system, involving statistical analysis, for winning on these races. They never developed a successful system, and in fact ended up losing so much money that Ada had to twice pawn the her husband’s family jewels (and end up borrowing even more money to retrieve the jewels before her husband found out).(Rheingold, 1985)

Her entire life was plagued by illness. Some of these include 14 she got a paralyzing illness, and at 29, after her third child, suffered a mental and physical breakdown. Many drugs were used to treat her, including addictive drugs, morphine and opium, and several types of alcohol, which would no doubt contribute to her worsening condition. Eventually she realized the danger of these drugs, and successfully quit taking them. At age 36, 1852, though, she died of uterine cancer.

The life of Augusta Ada Lovelace, Augusta was the name of Lord Byron’s half-sister, and which he named her after, contained many times of illness and other times of brilliance. So, after all it appears that she did indeed turn out much like many unfortunate, yet very popular and famous artists, in regards to the prevalence of illness and moments of insight. Though she lived a very interesting life and now remains one of the few women who were able to rise above the fact that women were not regarded as being equal to men in science and math. She excelled at both of these areas, which were often considered to be the sole domain of men in that time. She had a life full of friends and these friends were often quite impressive individuals themselves. These included Charles Babbage, Charles Dickens and Micheal Faraday (Toole). Another thing to note is that the Department of Defense named the language that they developed in 1979 after her, Ada.

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