We Are Living in Ada Lovelace's World
Computer algorithms influence what information we see on the internet
"Ada Lovelace, 1838" by Nefi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
When future historians grapple with our times, they are very likely to place Ada Lovelace near the beginning of Chapter One. You can be forgiven if you have never heard of her as she is much less well-known than she should be.
Ada Byron was born in 1815 in London. Her father was Lord Byron, one of the great romantic poets of the age, and her mother was Lady Byron, who studied mathematics at a high level long before women were allowed to go to university in England.
Lord and Lady Byron split up a month after the birth of their only baby together. The poet left the country and died within a few years. Lady Byron encouraged the girl to study mathematics and logic, which was unusual at the time, while keeping a close eye on her in case she had inherited her father’s rebellious streak. Ada was often ill as a child, but continued to develop her mathematical and technological skills even when she was confined to bed.
After an affair with a tutor that was covered up, the young lady married another aristocrat in 1835. Three years later, her husband became Earl of Lovelace, making Ada the Countess of Lovelace. She had three children. For most aristocratic women of the time, this would have been the end of the story.
Shortly before her marriage, though, the young mathematician had met Charles Babbage socially. He is known as the father of computers. He had invented the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, in 1819. The British government had given him a grant, but he failed to make a working model and the project was abandoned in 1842.
Towards the end of this project, Babbage improved his theoretical design by incorporating elements from the Jacquard loom, which used punched cards to change weaves on textiles. The inventor called the new computer the Analytical Engine. He first proposed it in 1837, but struggled to raise funds or to build it, although he gave a series of lectures on the new device in Turin in 1840.
One of the people who attended these lectures was Luigi Federico Menabrea, a mathematician who went on to become a general and Prime Minister of Italy. He wrote a description of the Analytical Engine in French, which was published in 1842.
Lovelace, who had three children by this time, decided to translate Menabrea’s text into English. She ended up doing much more than that. She supplemented it with her own words, making the text much longer. She saw that the Analytical Engine could do much more than simple calculations - it could run algorithms.
Many experts consider Lovelace the world’s first computer programmer. Others think that the honour should go to Babbage himself. In either case, Lovelace’s work had a sophistication and depth that had never been seen before. What makes this even more impressive is the fact that she worked out how to programme a computer that didn’t actually exist yet.
Sadly, Lovelace and Babbage fell out soon afterwards. When she was dying of cancer in her mid-30s, she wrote to him asking him to be the executor of her will. They resumed their friendship before she died in 1852.
In order to understand the power of Lovelace and Babbage’s achievement, we need to backtrack a little. An algorithm is defined by the dictionary as a set of rules for calculating and solving problems. Computer scientist Chris Bleakley says that algorithms can be as simple as a child counting out sweets with a friend. “One for you. One for me. One for you. One for me.”
We don’t know exactly when algorithms were discovered, but researchers have identified algorithmic texts during the Old Babylonian period, sometime between 1,800 BCE and 1,600 BCE. Algorithmic thinking thrived during the ancient world, but declined in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire.
The word algorithm comes from a Latin translation of a text by Persian polymath Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī. He published a book on the decimal system in Bagdad in 825 CE. When it was translated into Latin by Adelard of Bath, he called it Algoritmi de Numero Indorum and the name stuck.
Lovelace’s achievement was to come up with a way of programming the Analytical Engine in an algorithmic fashion so that it could generate Bernoulli numbers - a sequence of rational numbers.
Babbage and Lovelace were working some 40 years before the invention of the electric lightbulb. Electricity was the missing ingredient to make Babbage’s mechanical hardware come to life the following century. The first true algorithmic calculating machine was unveiled in 1946 after a project funded by the US Army.
John von Neumann – the inventor of game theory –was involved in the development of the first true computer. He returned to academia afterwards and oversaw another mainframe in the 1950s. Crucially, he gave away its plans to many researchers. Bleakley says this was the ancestor of all modern computers.
As computers have become increasingly faster, they have developed the ability to run very sophisticated algorithms. One major breakthrough was funded by Amazon. Early employee Greg Linden invented a recommendation engine. If Amazon clients typically bought two products together, but someone just bought one, the recommendation engine would ask if the client wanted to buy the other one.
Social media has taken recommendation engines and run with them in the years since then. They enable these platforms to bring personalised feeds of fresh content to millions of users simultaneously with little human oversight.
Although this is an amazing achievement, the results have often been problematic. YouTube’s recommendation engine was designed to keep viewers locked in for as long as possible by avoiding cognitive dissonance. This is done by recommending other videos that are similar to those you have enjoyed. If you watched a couple of Rosalía videos on YouTube, it might recommend more music by the same artist or something by C Tangana, for example, but would be unlikely to flag Christmas carols in German or a lecture on mechanical engineering in Swahili unless you had also been looking for similar content.
Sadly, this also means that if a viewer watched one Flat Earth video, his or her feed would soon be full of other videos pushing the same conspiracy theory. The recommendation engine would avoid flagging any videos debunking the idea as it would risk the user leaving the site in disappointment.
Social media sites have been cracking down on rampant misinformation in recent years, but the lesson should be clear. If you want to do any research about current affairs on the internet, please think hard about your methodology first. Algorithmic websites are very clever, but if you have a bad starting position, they can encourage you to head off in completely the wrong direction and then build an echo chamber to reinforce incorrect ideas. See you next week!
Further reading
Poems That Solve Puzzles by Chris Bleakley
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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.