Turin. Luigi Menabrea, a young military engineer who would later become Italian Prime Minister, published, with the help of Charles Babbage, a description of a general-purpose logic machine. It was the fruit of a scientific conference held in Turin. Ada Lovelace asked Babbage to translate the work. Babbage accepted (women did not write scientific papers at the time), and Ada took advantage of the opportunity to compile a masterwork: in addition to the translation, she added “Notes from the Translator,” 19,136 words long—three times the length of Menabrea’s work—which painted a visionary and more detailed picture. He signed himself AAL, and his notes would become the foundation of computer science. In Note A, for example, he envisioned a computer programmable an indefinite number of times to perform any computable task, envisioned the extension of De Morgan’s Boolean algebra and the use of symbols (variables), and envisioned the use of such a machine to compose and process music. In the final Note G, she envisions the use of computers to implement algorithms, subroutines, loops, routine libraries (which other women, Grace Hopper, Kay McNulty, and Jean Jennings, would create a century later), and conditional branching. She then details how to do this with destination registers, Boolean operations, and code comments. But to the final question, “Can a machine think?”, Ada believes the answer is no.
