@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Today is Ada Lovelace Day which was a day organized by Suw Charman-Anderson (former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group), to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. It’s well worth clicking on the image above and gaining some insights into the life, times and mathematical genius of Ada Lovelace who was the daughter of Lord Byron and also the key to the success of Charles Babbage’s difference engine which laid the foundations for the first computer. Ada Lovelace is credited for being the world’s first computer programmer.

That’s right: X chromosomes marked and hit the code spot first!

So 168 years after her translations in 1842 from French into English of Menabrea‘s Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage, who are the female technologists who’ve picked up the baton from Ada Lovelace? Some of them are listed here in a TechCrunch article from 2009 and Computer Weekly in 2010:

* http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-celebrating-women-in-tech/

* http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/witsend/2010/03/a-few-great-posts-for-ada-lovelace-day.html

For me, three women currently coding are inspirations (in no particular order):

* Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton and long-time collaborator with Sir Tim Berners-Lee)

* Adele E. Goldberg (founder of Neometron and the American computer scientist who developed the smalltalk language with Alan Kay)

* Caitlin Kelleher (who created Storytelling Alice for her PhD dissertation at Carnegie Mellon. This was a revolutionary step in applying programming, game principles and visualization to empower 8-15 year olds to be able to code.)

The most interesting question is whether any woman will be responsible for coding and developing a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE as a serious update to Babbage’s difference engine. In certain respects, today’s search algorithms and risk management systems are predicated on calculating differences, determinism and probabilities. Even with natural language, artificial intelligence and semantic stack advances it still can’t be said that a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE has been perfected.

Ada Lovelace wrote in her notes:

Again, [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . 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.

I’ve written previously that the 360-2020 engine is dependent not only on quantitative numbers but also on qualifying objects. This is mostly because I have some sense that the Bernoulli numbers, group sets, Bayesian statistics, chaos-Black-Scholes risk, Nash equilibrium integrals etc. that form the existing engines (calculating machines) which drive search, bank risk management and online transactions and recommendations are not differentiation engines. They’re still difference engines.

Now it would be quite something if in 2012, 170 years after Ada Lovelace wrote her notes and the first computer program, a woman could invent and launch a DIFFERENTIATION ENGINE that marries academic theories with commercial realities………..

Let’s hope she’s out there somewhere, :*).

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Ah and extremely early on in my creation of 360-2020 I  incorporated musical scales and sound as features. This was not because of Ada Lovelace’s comments (although this is an interesting coincidence), but mainly because I’m Chinese and our language has tones which sound similar to the music scale. In other words, Chinese is a lyrical language.

I also thought about musical notation and the five senses because of the piano my father bought me when I was 8, my flute, my guitar and my recorder. When you start learning how to play an instrument you get heightened insights into how each sense affects your perception, emotion towards and performance of music. Ah, and of course, there was ‘Wong Fei Hong’, ‘The Journey West’, ‘The Sound of Music’, ‘Easter Parade’, ‘West Side Story’ and other musicals (including Bollywood oneswhich I loved watching endlessly as a child. Plus my parents were constantly either humming or singing Chinese songs, aka their early version of karaoke (or as I called it “canary olde”). All of the music exposure I had long before I learnt about Ada Lovelace.

It’s funny how the learning we’re exposed to during our formative years informs us decades later……..