with the addition of extensive explanatory ‘Notes’, was by Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and only product of the short-lived marriage between the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Ada Lovelace, who was twenty-eight years old and a mother of three when the ‘Sketch’ was published, developed a passion for mathematical ideas at an early age. With all the emotional volatility of her father – although a cruelly restricted upbringing could have had as much to do with this as genetics – her own assessment of her mathematical gifts was sometimes unrealistic. But she formed a strong intellectual bond with Babbage, and proved an able advocate of his work. Her ‘Notes’ constitute the first accessible description of the capabilities and limitations of a computer. And a century before the sensational ‘electronic brain’ articles began to appear in the British and American press, she knew better than to oversell the discovery. ‘It is desirable,’ she wrote, ‘to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine … The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to
originate any thing. It can do whatever we
know how to order it to perform … Its province is to assist us in making
available, what we are already acquainted with’ (her italics). Today, when commentators frequently speculate that machine intelligence is on the verge of taking over from the human variety, her remark seems as percipient as ever.
