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In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron prophesied that

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his voice would one day blend with the future visions of his daughter, and

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in ways that he never have anticipated he turned out to be proved right.

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In her letters,

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Ada Lovelace compares her work as an analyst with her father's as a poet.

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And claims to have, in fact, a very high order of poetical genius.

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Even wondering if one day poetry might be her destiny or ultimate line.

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Today I want to argue that the poetical consciousness that Lovelace brings to her

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understanding of the analytical engine, proves to be the genesis of some of her

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most original mathematical and scientific ideas.

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We can find traces of romantic and poetic thought in her argument that the engine

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might be adapted to ends other than calculation, in her recognition that it

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enables an embodiment of what she turns the science of operations.

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In her longing to develop a calculus of the nervous system, and

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in her commentary on the problematic nature of originality.

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Like Manfred and Astarte, Lovelace and

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Byron shared many of the same lone thoughts and wanderings.

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A quest for hidden knowledge and a mind to comprehend the universe.

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But through translating her poetical inheritance into a mathematical and

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scientific sphere, Lovelace is able to bring a startlingly unique perspective to

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bear on Babbage's engines, which allowed her to conceptualize them in ways that

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nobody else at the time had dreamed of.

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What recently observed in the innovators that Lovelace has subsequently become

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somewhat associated with the question of whether or

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not man made machines can ever truly think.

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I want to inject however whether the question perhaps better formulated to

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her actual interest is whether or not they can produce works of art.

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Arguably, Lovelace's greatest contribution to computer science was her realization

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that the analytical engine had a certain universality.

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That it could be adapted to operate upon things other than numbers.

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That it might for instance, compose elaborate and

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scientific pieces of music, of any degree or complexity or extent.

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Nor is the engine's artistic scope necessarily limited to music.

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Lovelace describes the engine weaving algebraical patterns just as the weaves

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flowers and leaves and also points out the highly complex desire that the Jackard

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loom was capable of itself suggesting a possible encroachment on the visual arts.

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Now Byron once described his own poetry as words woven into song.

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If the engine could read algebraic patterns might it also, or some future

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iteration of it, likewise weave poetry by acting upon words instead of numbers.

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Now this suggestion doesn't explicitly appear in Lovelace's writing but

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the concept of machine made literature

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turns up surprisingly frequently in the 19th century.

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The best known attempt at actually creating something like this was

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John Clark's eureka machine which composed Latin examples by randomly combining

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various words to fill a pre-arranged metrical and grammatical structure.

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According to the inventor in an article in the Athenaeum,

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the machine contains letters in alphabetical arrangement

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which the machine selects to form lines of poetry.

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Quote [COUGH] through the medium of numbers,

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rendered intangible by being expressed on real work.

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More frequently however this idea of machine made is raised in a satirical

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context, in 1844 a few years after Lovelace's influential notes and

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I think possibly even influenced by the suggestion that the engine could be

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adapted to ends other than calculation.

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The magazine Punch lampooned Babbage's productions.

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With the suggestion of a new patent mechanical novel writer.

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Adapted to all styles and all subjects.

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Pointed, pathetic, historic, silver fork, and Minerva.

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Which would allow the writer to turn out a three volume novel in a mere 48 hours.

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Needing to do nothing more than throw in some dozen of the most popular

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works of the day.

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And draw forth a spick and span new and original novel.

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And I always find this comic particularly amusing in light of the fact that

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Babbage himself once considered composing a three volume novel in order to use

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the proceeds from this to finance the difference engine.

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And fortunately, before he got to the stage of actually attempting this,

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he discussed it with a literary friend.

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Who convinced him that this would be a terrible idea financially,

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[LAUGH] but perhaps the mechanical novel writer could've been

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the solution to all of his financial woes.

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In any case there are also earlier romantic

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engagements with this notion of mechanized writing, so and

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what could almost be a premonition of the eureka machine,

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writes that language had come to resemble a series of larger and smaller stereotype

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pieces which required only an ordinary portion of ingenuity to very indefinitely.

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And yet still produce something which if not sensed,

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would be [INAUDIBLE] to do as well.

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That had become mechanized as it were into a barrel organ, suggests that

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Coleridge perhaps shared Babbage's notorious distaste for street musicians.

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[LAUGH] As Lovelace writes,

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the analytical engine may act upon any objects whose mutual

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fundamental relations could be expressed by the abstract science of operations.

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If language is degenerated into a series of conventional stereotypes of

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the kind suggested by Coleridge.

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Then it too might be capable of mechanization.

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This possibility is also dramatized by Sir Walter Scott

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in his preface to The Betrothed.

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Now in this curious fictionalized preface,

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Scott represents his own series of Waverley novels as the product of

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a collective of authors all publishing under the same name.

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The preface takes the form of minutes to a meeting in which they're discussing

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the possibility that at the expense of little mechanism,

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some part of the labor of composing these novels might be saved by the use of steam.

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Facilitated by the fact that many of these novels are composed out of commonplaces.

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To quote, by placing the words and

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phrases technically implored on these subjects in a sort of framework and

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changing them by such as a mechanical processes as that which readers of Damask

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alter their patterns many new and happy combinations cannot fail to occur.

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While the author, tired of pumping his own brains,

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may have an agreeable relaxation in the use of his fingers.

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It's worth noting, by the way, that this preface was published in 1825.

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So long before Babbage made any plans to incorporate

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features of the Jacquard loom into the analytical engine.

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So Scott actually comes up with this idea first.

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I think it's also interesting that the author of Waverly as referenced in

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the punch comic that I was talking about earlier.

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Which I think makes it clear that contemporary audiences were supposed to

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connect the two.

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All of these descriptions seem to presuppose that any type of

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literature capable of mechanization must necessarily be bad or derivative.

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Composed of randomly compiled hackneyed tropes and tripe components.

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As Lovelace notes, the analytical engine cannot originate anything.

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It can only do what we know how to order it to perform.

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And as it cannot produce new ideas, it would have at the most

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the capacity only to rearrange and recombine ones that already existed.

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Can such products really be called artworks?

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We should consider, however, whether the engine's inability to originate ideas

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really renders it substantially different from the human mind.

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As Alan Turing observed in response to what he dubbed Lady Lovelace's objection,

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who can be certain that original work that he's done was not simply the growth of

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the seed planted in him by teaching or the effect of following well known principles.

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Or as the poet Shelly puts it, every man's mind is modified by

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all the objects of a nature and art, but every word and

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every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness.

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This relationship between consciousness, agency, originality and

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artistic production was a vexed one for the romantic poets.

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As a youth, Coleridge was a disciple of David Hartley's associationism or

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psychological determinism.

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A theory which argued that, since the component particles of the human

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body are subjected to the same subtle laws as other material entities.

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The power of generating ideas must also arise from corporeal causes.

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Coleridge early on declared himself an advocate for the automatism of man.

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And a believer in the corporeality of thought itself.

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He later became disillusioned with this theory although unfortunately after

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he had named his first born son Hartley.

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Expostulating that under this model, all acts of will, thought, and

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attention became parts and products of a blind mechanisms.

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And that the whole universe cooperates to produce the minutest stroke

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of every letter.

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Save only that I myself and I alone have nothing to do with it.

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But merely the causeless and effectless beholding of it when it is done.

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Hartley's associationist model of the mind posed the danger of reducing

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even Shakespeare to an automaton of genius.

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And attributed no more originality to the human mind

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than could be found in the analytical engine.

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Many of the anxiety surrounding Hartley's deterministic model of the mind

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come to be embodied in romantic poetry and the figure of the Aeolian harp.

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Now and Aeolian harp is an instrument which is often placed in

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the casement of the window.

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So that the breeze is allowed to sweep across it.

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And so it's played by the wind alone.

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Untouched by human hand.

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Swept into musical expression by the movement of the air.

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Coleridge is aware likewise just organic harps which tremble into

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thought as the intellectual breeze sweeps through us, Shelly describes the mind as

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an instrument over which external and internal impressions are driven

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like the alternations of an ever changing wind over the Aeolian land.

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This quintessentially romantic figure of chaotic politic expression might seem at

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first to have little in common with Babbage's analytical engine, however in

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the separate context they both crystallize a number of concerns surrounding

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the relationship between the material world and the processes of the mind.

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Neither the harp nor the engine can think, per se, but in producing music or

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performing calculations, they do perform, in Buxton's words,

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certain offices of thought.

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Suggesting that some mathematical or

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artistic processes might be able to take place through purely mechanical means.

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They are both material passive objects, but

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are nevertheless roused into artistical mathematical production by outside forces.

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Now Lovelace was incidentally an accomplished harpist.

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Sometimes practicing four or five hours a day.

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And occasionally even to the detriment of her mathematics.

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It's interesting that in describing her own scientific abilities, she represents

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herself in terms which simultaneously evoke both of these figures,

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the harp and the engine.

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She describes herself in several places as being fundamentally passive,

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acted upon by divine or external forces and requiring very powerful and

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continually acting external stimulants to excite her into activity.

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She refer to herself in one memorable passage as,

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not a bit my own agent into my own scientific progress on objects.

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But simply the instrument for divine purposes to act on and through.

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She merely speaks the voice that she's inspired with.

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And functions as a vocal organ for

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the ears of mortals on behalf of God and His agents.

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She goes on to state that she might refuse this mission.

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But that she would be thrown out of gear with the heavenly.

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Now her use of the word instrument in this passage is particularly clever

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because it could evoke either a scientific or a musical instrument.

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When she alludes to becoming a vocal organ or being inspired with the voice,

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she seems to hint towards the aeolian harper, a musical instrument.

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Her use of the word inspire in particular from the Latin inspirare to breathe or

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blow into also suggests the surge of the divine sweeping through the lair.

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However the reference to being thrown out of gear with the heavenly clearly

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evokes Babbage's engines which were designed to jam

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immediately if they were ever thrown out of gear.

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For Lovelace then the harp and the engine are almost interchangeable metaphors which

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emerges together to help describe her own creative and scientific production.

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Lovelace's letters suggest that her own views of phycology might've tended towards

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something similar to Hartley's psychological determinism.

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She describes herself as a molecular laboratory,

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a portion of the material forces of the word entitled The Body of AAL.

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And refers to one of her correspondents as a chaotic mass of various androgynous

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atoms, organic and inorganic.

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She was interested in German research on the microscopical structure and changes in

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the brain, nervous matter and also in the blood and had her hopes of one day getting

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cerebral phenomena such that she could put them into mathematical equations.

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In short a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of.

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She hoped bequeathed to the generations a calculus of the nervous system.

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The implications of this ambition are quite astounding, if she had been able to

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develop a system of this sort such that it could be programmed into an engine,

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then Dyonassi proclamation that the powers of thought had been thrown

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into real work would've been generally realized.

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Now Lovelace of course never completed her calculus of the nervous system.

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However the analytical engine did still make some inroads into the processes of

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human thought.

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As Lovelace writes, the analytical engine is capable of both analysis and synthesis.

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To processes which even the romantic poets conceded to be legitimate components of

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poetic production.

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Shelley begins his defense of poetry, for instance, by defining synthesis and

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analysis precisely as the two principle classes of mental action.

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Reason, he writes, is the principle of analysis.

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The process by which the mind contemplates the relation

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borne by one thought to another.

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Like algebraichal representations which conduct a certain general results, and

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this is his words.

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Imagination, on the other hand, is the principal of synthesis, which allows

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the mind to compose from those thoughts, as from elements of the thoughts.

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According to Shelley, poetry creates by combination and representation.

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Poetical abstractions,

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as he writes in his preface of Prometheus Unbound, are beautiful and new

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not because the portions of which they're composed had no previous existence.

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But because of the combinations which can be produced from these basic elements.

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Lovelace also conveniently wrote an essay on the imagination and fragmentary form.

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In which she too defines the combining faculty

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as one of its two principle functions.

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A faculty which brings together things, facts, ideas,

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conceptions In new, original, endless epivariant combination.

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Even if the analytical engine can't originate anything in its capacity for

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combination at the very least it does participate for both Lovelace and

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Shelly in some of the most important aspects of imaginative creation.

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And I'd actually like to pinch a quotation for

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Sharon Rosson's talk on at the graduate workshop on Tuesday.

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I hope you don't mind.

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This time for Mary Shelley and her introduction to Frankenstein.

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Invention doesn't consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos.

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The materials must, in the first place, be afforded.

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The workings of the analytical engine, therefore, seem not entirely divorced from

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the processes by which the mind produces poetry.

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In fact, for Lovelace, for

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whom mathematics was characterized by an intrinsic beauty and symmetry.

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The engines mathematical productions are almost artistic in their own right,

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like poetry or language, mathematics represents the world using symbols.

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Lovelace often describes mathematics as a language in fact,

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the language of unseen relations between things or the language through which alone

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we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.

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And read the creator's works.

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In these descriptions she occurs an idea which we find throughout all romantic

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poetry, the idea that the world is a text of some sort which can be made legible for

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mankind through the means of language, mathematics or other types of symbol.

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Coleridge for example writes that the universe in the most

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literal sense is God's written language or the transcript of the omnipotent.

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In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron's narrative desires to

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quit man's works again to read his Maker's spread about me.

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This idea that the world is a text composed out of a sort of language,

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mathematical or otherwise, produces a rather unusual and akin but

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none the less powerful idea in both Lovelace and her romantic precursors.

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As Humberta Echo writes in The Search for the Perfect Language,

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if it were true that the universe was constructed from letters and numbers.

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It would follow that whoever knew the mathematical rules behind this

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construction might act directly on the universe.

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This leads to the desire, I'd think, as Coleridge phrases it,

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to destroy the old antithesis of words and things.

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Elevating, as it were, words into things.

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And living things, too.

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A desire to imbue language or mathematics with a concreteness

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that would allow it to retain a kind of reality in itself.

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We find this in Kublai Khan when Coleridge aspires to a song so

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powerful that it would manifest itself as a dome in the air.

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Byron too longs for words which are things, as he says.

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He writes in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, could I embody and

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unbosom now that which is most within me.

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Could I reap my thoughts upon expression and thus through soul, heart,

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mind, passions, feeling strong or weak.

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All that I would have sought and all I seek ban nerve feel and yet

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breathe into one word and that one word were lightning I would speak.

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This seems like a strange notion and it's easy to dismiss as matterful but

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this longing that it might be possible to produce a language so

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powerful that it could break out into the physical world like a bolt of lightning,

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embodied in reality has existed throughout the ages in the forms of

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beliefs in the efficacy of spells and incantations.

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In the religious tradition of the primal creative.

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It's what speaks of when he describes the superstitious utility of poetry,

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which through the hypnotic quality of it's rhythm led

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people to believe that they could throw it around the gods like a magic noose.

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And what laments when he writes that language is liked a cracked kettle

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on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to.

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While all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

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As Byron writes, why should not the mind act with and upon the universe.

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As portions of it act upon and with the congregated dust called mankind.

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See how one man acts upon himself and others or upon multitudes.

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The same agency in a higher and purer degree may act upon the stars, etc.

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Ad infinitum.

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In a way this is almost the inverse of the problem that we were considering in

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relation to Hartley's associationism.

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Hartley's theory dealt with how the physical world shaped or

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affected the mind, but

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Byron is interested in how the mind might act upon the physical world.

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The hero of Mantrid achieves an agency of this nature.

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Which renders the earth, ocean, air, night and mountains at his beck and bidding.

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A poem that significantly he executes through language, a written charm.

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Lovelace is not immune to these sorts of fantasies.

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She maintains that she has mysterious powers over others,

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selling herself a fairy and the High Priestess of Babbage's Engine.

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Babbage himself referred to her as an enchantress who has thrown her magic

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spell around the most abstract of sciences.

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In a letter to her mother, she declared that she will in time be an autocrat.

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Commanding marshalled regiments and harmoniously disciplined troops.

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Consisting of vast numbers marching in irresistible power to the sound of music.

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Rather than desiring to command nature or spirits with words, spells and

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enchantments, she longs to command machinery through the science of

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operations and her claim to autocratic dominion through the powers of mathematics

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is as fantastic and imaginative as that of her literary predecessors.

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In addition to this fairyism however she perceives an analytical engine,

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a practical means of enacting some of the incarnational or

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materializing possibilities that Coleridge and Byron yearned for in literature.

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The analytical engine literally incarnates mathematical

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operations into the movements of its physical metallic structure.

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Impressed into the turning of its wheels.

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Numbers and operations are represented physically on cogs and on punch cards.

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And when the handle is cranked,

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they're combined and woven together in physical space.

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Tracing out in their movement the very mathematical operations that they're

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actually undergoing.

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As such, the analytical engine establishes, in Lovelace's words,

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a uniting link between the operations of matter and the most abstract

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mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.

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It brings the mental and material into more intimate and

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affective connection with each other.

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It translates the principles of mathematics into explicit practical forms.

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It is as she says an embodying of the science of operations, the material and

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mechanical representative of analysis.

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It manages in its own way to destroy the anthesis not between words and things, but

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between things and mathematical symbols.

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Before I finish I want to return to a passage from Babbage's Ninth

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Bridgewater Treatise, which Richard Holmes also quoted yesterday.

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Babbage describes how the vibrations of the human voice impress the air with

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pulsations, so that each of atom retains the motions of all the words that have

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ever reverberated within it.

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The air he writes is one vast library, through of mutable but

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characters recording everything that has ever been spoken.

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Byron longed for a word that would strike lightening from the sky.

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But as Babbage explains,

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all words in fact are forever indelibly impressed upon the air.

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The operator of the analytical engine likewise would send

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ripples through it's mechanism,

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and the difference engine in motion if you've seen it literally does ripple.

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Just like the reverberations of a voice in the air or

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like a breeze sweeping through the Aeolian harp.

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But with a permanency and

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a solidity which preserved it's sorts for human as well as cosmic record.

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The analytical engine gives us that which Wordsworth longed for in the prelude.

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Some element for

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the mind to stamp an image on in nature somewhat nearer to her own.

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Lovelace's approach to the powers of analytical engine is rooted, I think,

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in modes of thinking which we more often associated with poetry.

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It's because of this that she was able to conceive of the analytical

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engine in a radically inefficient way.

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As a mechanism capable of analyzing, synthesizing, and

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combining not only mathematics, but music, art, potentially even language.

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She sees the engine not just as a calculating tool, but

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as the fulfillment of the romantic dream of poetic embodiment.

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Lovelace was in truth her father's heir, and she likewise bestows on the analytical

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engine, the poetical inheritance of the Aeolian harp.

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Lovelace imagines the intellectual breeze sweeping through the engine just as it

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sweeps through Alia, producing music, mathematics and other works of art and

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beauty as it passes, incarnating them into its physical structure of brass,

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as such her work deserves.

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Owns the title that she aspired to, that of a poetical science.

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>> [APPLAUSE]