260 | 24 TURING, lOVElACE, AND BABBAGE
opening statements declaring the purpose of the machine differ in specifics, but in each his
ambitions for the engine are confined to mathematics with no reference as to how, through
representation, computers could make statements about the world. Lovelace’s emphasis on
symbolic representation, and her mention of the use of arbitrary rules invented by the user^21
pre-echoes features of universality in Turing’s work.^22
Both Lovelace and Turing speculated about machine intelligence and the relationship
between computing and the brain. Lovelace argued for the amenability of mental process to
logical or mathematical description when, in 1844, three months after her Sketch was published
she wrote:^23
I have my hopes . . . of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into math-
ematical equations; in short a law, or laws, for the mutual actions of the molecules of brain l
(equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary and sidereal world).
. . . none of the physiologists have yet got on the right tack . . . It does not appear to me that cer-
ebral matter need be more unmanageable to mathematicians than sidereal and planetary matters
and 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.
While working on the ACE in the 1940s Turing wrote:^24
In working on the ACE I am more interested in the possibility of producing models of the action
of the brain than in the practical applications to computing.
Lovelace wrote that the ‘Analytical Engine has no pretentions whatever to originate anything.
It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform’.^25 In his paper ‘Computing machinery
and intelligence’, published in 1950, Turing called the view that machines were incapable of
originating anything ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’ and he used this as a counterpoint to argue for
more generous limits to the potential for intelligent machines.^26
The apparent paradox of rule-based creativity was one of many issues provoked by the first
essay into machine intelligence prompted by Babbage’s calculating engines and later engaged
with by Turing with challenging originality. Many of the self-same issues that arose in the early
19th century continue to confound and preoccupy us nearly two centuries later, and the vigour
of these debates remains unabated as developments in neurosciences and machine intelligence
leap-frog each other.
The design of the Analytical Engine was sufficiently advanced by 1837 for Babbage to write
‘programs’, though neither Lovelace nor Babbage used that term. Between 1837 and 1840
Babbage wrote twenty-four such programs for a variety of problems. His programs were mainly
illustrations of how the engine could do things that could already be done by hand— solutions
for simultaneous equations of various kinds, and three examples of series calculated using
recurrence relations requiring the iteration of the same set of operations.
Babbage’s writing was largely technocentric, consisting as it did of how the engine worked and
what it did. Lovelace, on the other hand, was concerned with the significance of the machine, its
wider implications, and its potential. Her program for the calculation of Bernoulli numbers, for
which she is famed, while possessing the same format as Babbage’s earlier programs, is signifi-
cantly more ambitious than Babbage’s early examples. It does not appear that Babbage returned
to programming after 1840 to provide solutions to new problems, though the capabilities of the
engine grew in the years that followed.