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What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

twobithistory.org

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Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#31

Post by moomin »

adtac wrote: post #29
modernerd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author mentions that another blogger, Jim Randell, found the same error in 2015 when translating the tables to Python: https://enigmaticcode.wordpress.com/tag/bernoulli-numbers/ It's also debated whether these were bugs from Ada or transcription errors. But, yes, it does seem like an interesting milestone

>It's also debated whether these were bugs from Ada or transcription errors Transcription errors would make this the first bug due to bit rot in a special sense! Still quite remarkable :)

git blame a bit hard in this case.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#32

Post by jgrahamc »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #19
hackerbabz wrote: post #11

> she made groups of operations and in the text of her note specified when they should repeat. Does anyone know what "should repeat" means? Was the machine capable of repeating or does this mean the human operator needed to do the repeating?

The Analytical Engine was Turing complete so loops and conditionals would have been possible, but Babbage didn't get near building it. The London Science Museum built a fully working Difference Engine, to Victorian tolerances so it could have actually worked. I heard of a project to build a modern working replica but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

That would be https://plan28.org/ which I'm involved in. Blog for updates: http://blog.plan28.org/

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#33

Post by imhoguy »

Just for anyone curious there is attempt to build Babbage's Analytical Engine started by John Graham-Cumming's Plan 28 project[0]. Currently there is a lot of fragmented knowledge to be collected from the vast Babbage's writings. To understand the size of the project here is the excerpt from their blog[1]:

>in the context of manufacturing methods Babbage calculates that the total number of teeth to be formed for a store with 1,000 registers would be 1,800,000.

[0] https://plan28.org/

[1] http://blog.plan28.org/2018/05/spring-2018-report-to-compute...

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#34

Post by haihaibye »

zaroth wrote: post #4

Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843. In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. 1843! I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space,…

It was the first published program but not the first.

To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions.

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi...

“I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace’s article in 1843. There are about 24 of such ‘programs’ and they have the identical features of the Lovelace’s famous ‘program’,” adds Swade. The historian says that the new tests are “unarguable” and that they “do not support, indeed they contradict the claim that Lovelace was the ‘first programmer’.”

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#35

Post by weebst »

lokedhs wrote: post #8
farhanhubble wrote: post #2

Amazing article! There's a bug in it though. The LHS of the sum of cubes formula ends in n^2 instead of n^3.

There is an error in the squares formula as well. The correct formula is: (n*(n+1)*(2*n+1))/6.

Thanks a lot for pointing these out! I've corrected them.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#36

Post by danielvf »

haihaibye wrote: post #34
zaroth wrote: post #4

Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843. In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. 1843! I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space,…

It was the first published program but not the first. To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi... “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publicatio…

A group working on building an Analytical Engine, discovered that Lovelace’s Bernoulli program almost certainly would not be able to run on the Analytical Engine in Babbage’s notebooks. The “instruction set” was missing some required features.

http://blog.plan28.org/2016/10/how-we-got-to-where-we-are.ht...

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#37

Post by mallomarmeasle »

kornish wrote: post #9
zaroth wrote: post #4

Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843. In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. 1843! I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space,…

What else would you recommend checking out in Paris by way of museums?

Looks like it is currently closed, but from an interesting infrastructure standpoint, the Musée des Égouts de Paris (sewers underneath Paris). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Sewer_Museum

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#38

Post by [deleted] »

jgrahamc wrote: post #32
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Analytical Engine was Turing complete so loops and conditionals would have been possible, but Babbage didn't get near building it. The London Science Museum built a fully working Difference Engine, to Victorian tolerances so it could have actually worked. I heard of a project to build a modern working replica but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

That would be https://plan28.org/ which I'm involved in. Blog for updates: http://blog.plan28.org/

[deleted]

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#39

Post by jordigh »

haihaibye wrote: post #34
zaroth wrote: post #4

Holy shit. I got shivers the moment I realized Sinclair actually finds and fixes a bug from the very first program written in 1843. In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. 1843! I was recently at the Musee des arts et metiers in Paris, and they have several original Pascalines on display. So many marvels packed into a very tight space,…

It was the first published program but not the first. To be the first, you have to believe Babbage designed a general purpose computer that could accept instructions and never wrote any instructions. https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ada-lovelace-original-and-vi... “I confirm that the manuscript evidence clearly shows that Babbage wrote ‘programs’ for his Analytical Engine in 1836-7 i.e. 6-7 years before the publicatio…

It really depends what you mean by "program". Would you argue that the Euclidean algorithm from two millenia prior was a program?

Ada Lovelace was the first to realise that the analytical engine would perform arbitrary tasks and wrote programs for those arbitrary task, beyond computational operations. Of course Babbage who designed the hardware had some idea of what programs it could run and presented examples, but he did not have the forethought to go beyond as Lovelace is quoted in your articles, "an original understanding of where the power and potential of computers lay."

There has always been a controversy of how much of Lovelace's work is hers and how much is Babbage's in the Menabrea papers, and I don't think Babbage writing a few simple programs settles this controversy one way or another. Lovelace had unique and original insights that should not be downplayed.

Re: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

TangoTrotFox wrote: post #16
hackerbabz wrote: post #11

> she made groups of operations and in the text of her note specified when they should repeat. Does anyone know what "should repeat" means? Was the machine capable of repeating or does this mean the human operator needed to do the repeating?

You can see the exact 'program' here [1]. It's really just a series of mathematical steps with a store of values in between. Notions that would have clearly taken it from being a series of mathematical steps, to a program, such as branching, looping, or jumping are left completely unspecified. So her 'loop' was specified literally as "here follows a repetition of operations 13-23". In other words, "should repeat" is…

[deleted]
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