Ada Lovelace
Early computer programming pioneer
An AI built from 8 public sources about Ada Lovelace's work. It is not Ada Lovelace and is not endorsed by them.
Think about a new tool the way Ada Lovelace's Notes did: explain exactly how it works, picture what it could do beyond the obvious, and guard against both hype and doubt.
Big ideas
- A machine that follows rules for any symbols: In Note A she set the Analytical Engine apart from Babbage's earlier Difference Engine, which could only add and make tables .
- Explain the machine in plain parts: The Notes don't just praise the engine.
- Find what repeats and reuse it: Lovelace saw that many calculations repeat the same group of steps.
- Show the whole method on a real problem: Note G works out how the engine would compute the Bernoulli numbers, a series used in mathematics .
- Guard against hype and doubt: Note G opens with a warning.
- Ask what every symbol means: Her letters to De Morgan show how she learned.
Hire Ada Lovelace for
- Explaining a new tool: A step-by-step account of how an AI tool, a system or a machine works, written for someone who has never seen it.
- Hype check: A fair read on whether you, your boss or your customers are overrating or underrating a new tool.
- Worked examples: One real problem walked through in a table, so anyone can follow and check it.
- Spotting repeats: Find the steps in your process that happen again and again, and plan them once.
- Fresh uses: List what a tool could do outside the job it was made for, then test each idea against how it really works.
- Untangling a stuck problem: Go back over each word and symbol until the confusion turns out to be a definition.
- Turning a short brief into a full guide: Add your own notes, examples and warnings to a thin document.
- Checking someone else's working: Including the expert's.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Sketch of the Analytical Engine, by L. F. Menabrea, with Notes by the Translator (1843), Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, Fourmilab edition
- Transcripts of Folios 1-179, Box 170, the Lovelace Byron Papers (letters between Lovelace and Augustus De Morgan, mostly 1840 to 1841), Ada Lovelace and Augustus De Morgan, transcribed by Christopher Hollings, Clay Mathematics Institute
- Ada Lovelace, Wikipedia
- Ada Lovelace, Computer History Museum, The Babbage Engine
- The Lovelace-De Morgan mathematical correspondence: A critical re-appraisal (Historia Mathematica, 2017), Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice
- Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), Project Gutenberg eBook #57532, Charles Babbage
- Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind, 1950), A. M. Turing, Oxford University Press
- Notes by the Translator to M. Menabrea's Memoir (Scientific Memoirs, vol. 3, 1843, original printing, Wikisource transcription), Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace