'Note G' is the culmination of Lovelace’s paper, following many pages of detailed explanation of the operation of the Engine and the cards, and the notation of the tables. The paper shows Lovelace’s obsessive attention to mathematical detail – it also shows her imagination in thinking about the bigger picture.
Lovelace observed a fundamental principle of the machine, that the operations, defined by the cards, are separate from the data and the results. She observed that the machine might act upon things other than number, if those things satisfied mathematical rules. “Supposing”, she wrote: “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.”
She thought about how the engine might do algebra, how it “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”, and how it might make new discoveries; “We might even invent laws for series or formulæ in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining.”
Lovelace’s paper is an extraordinary accomplishment, probably understood and recognised by very few in its time, yet still perfectly understandable nearly two centuries later. It covers algebra, mathematics, logic, and even philosophy; a presentation of the unchanging principles of the general-purpose computer; a comprehensive and detailed account of the so-called “first computer program”; and an overview of the practical engineering of data, cards, memory, and programming.
http://bit.ly/2yo6PTq
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