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Science

1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage 160

Posted by CmdrTaco from the lighthearted-afternoon-read dept.
dipfan writes "A new book tells the extraordinary true story of a clock-work chess-playing "machine" named The Turk that wowed Europe and the US in the 18th and 19th century, beating Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, among others. Although it turned out to be a cleverly designed trick, the device is credited with inspiring Charles Babbage (the father of the computer), who played and lost to the automaton in 1820, with the idea that a mechanical engine could be programed to perform tasks... and the rest is computing history, right up to IBM's Deep Blue. There's an article by the author at Wired, and the preface and first chapter of the book The Mechanical Turk available online."
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1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage More

1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage

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  • gain computers, lose clockwork (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sniepre ( 517796 ) <sniepre@gmail.com> on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:16PM (#3384126) Homepage
    From the first link .. "Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."

    What is sad to me, is that with the progression of 20th-century computers, and digital watches where even an analouge-faced watch is controlled by quartz crystal and battery, it seems as though the *art* of clockwork has been forgotton....
    • some people still make them, but unless you want to force people to pay vastly more for their timepieces the art of the mechanical watch is going to become mroe and more rare.
    • Advanced mechanical clockwork is basically the same thing as program code, just physically, and therefore much more complex.
    • The art of clockwork has not been forgotten, it's just more expensive to build a clock full mechanicaly.
    • One might also say that the art of carriage building has been forgotten by the makers of automobiles... or the art of the sword has been forgotten by weapon "smiths" of the today...

      An art is only as pertinent as the times in which they exist. The art itself has not been forgotten, but is merely not practiced due to its unnecessary nature.
    • There's a very interesting sub-genre of cyberpunk called steampunk. Clockwork automatons, clockwork airships, eccentric gadgeteers and scientists, all mixed in with a Victorian backdrop.

      Steampunk comic books, computer games, and role-playing games exist, but you might have to search a little harder than usual to find them.
    • Read "the Difference engine" by William Gibson. The proginator of cyberpunk spins a tale about a steam powered computer. Cyber-steam-punk, the best of both worlds. Holy sweet mojo batman.

      ~Matt~
    • Ummm you dont know whats happening in watchmaking obiously:

      The Erotic Hour Striker Jaquemart [diamondsandwatches.com] for a fine example of modern watchmaking.

      Nothing has been lost at all.
    • Link: http://www.iwc.ch/collections/collection/complicat ions/gc-en.asp - Production limited to 50 watches per year - Mechanical movement - Self-winding - Chronograph - Minute repeater - Perpetual calendar - Four-digit year display - Perpetual moon phase display - Small seconds with stop function - 659 parts - Screw-in crown - Crown-activated rapid calendar advance - Convex sapphire glass - Case diameter 42,2 mm Quote: "One of the world's most complex wristwatches gets the energy it needs to display the time automatically from the movements of the arm. The chronograph records times up to twelve hours to an accuracy of one-eighth of a second. The calendar is mechanically programmed for the next 500 years. The minute repeater chimes out the time in hours, quarters and minutes whenever you wish."

  • Just knowing it's possible (even when it isn't) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gavin Scott ( 15916 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:25PM (#3384159)
    We once had a customer ask for a software feature that looked virtually impossible to implement, but the customer claimed that our competitor's product had the feature and that they would buy our product if we added this feature to it. So we figured it couldn't be that hard then, and we managed to add the feature with a couple days effort.

    Of course it later turned out that the competing product did not have this feature and in fact nobody had ever done it before.

    G.

      • We had (at my previous place of employment) a product that let the user manage print job "spool files" on a proprietary commercial operating system (HP 3000 MPE/V). We were already able show the user data going to "open" spoolfiles that were being created, but only up to the point that the last block of records was posted to disk.

        The request was to be able to see (in real time) the very latest writes that had been made to the file even though it had not been posted yet. The claim was that the competition did this.

        The solution required hunting down the process specific in-memory file buffers for the open spoolfile object and extracting the data from the buffer and polling for new records as the program wrote them (without crashing the machine if the process went away, etc.).

        This had to be reverse engineered with no source code for the OS and no help from the OS vendor.

        We thought it was a pretty clever hack at the time, more so after finding out that the competitor's program really only displayed the most recently posted full block of data just as our program had done.

        G.
    • That reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid. A team of two humans was competing with a team of two aliens, to see which team was better at inventing stuff, or rather reproducing an invention from the other's culture.

      The aliens gave the humans a perpetual motion machine as the device that they had to reproduce. Of course the humans figured it was impossible, it must be a hoax, etc. Eventually they decided it was real, and so they set out and invented one themselves.

      (At the end, the aliens revealed that in fact theirs *was* a hoax. The humans had given a fake anti-gravity machine to the aliens, but the alien team couldn't reproduce it, and to avoid diplomatic problems, etc., the human team finally decided they had to invent an actual anti-grav device as well in order to get out of their predicament.)

      It was an enjoyable little story, at least when I read it as a kid.
    • Yes! If only we KNEW that FTL travel was possible.
    • If you don't know that it can't be done, then you try and maybe you'll succeed. Just because people think it can't be done doesn't mean that it's impossible to do.
  • You gotta be kidding! My old 486 always beats me, and that damned thing is generally slower than a dead rock!

  • A picture of the machine: (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chagrin ( 128939 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:29PM (#3384168) Homepage
    http://web.media.mit.edu/~wsack/CAA/chess-machine. html

  • Ebook heads-up (Score:5, Informative)

    by joebp ( 528430 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:34PM (#3384188) Homepage
    Here's a free ebook [chesscentral.com] on Maelzel's Chess Player, written by Edgar Allan Poe. It looks pretty good [chesscentral.com].

  • any sufficiently short midget... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    what's that expression? any sufficiently short midget is indistinguishable from magic!
  • The end-all be-all of chess was not embodied in any creation by IBM, that's for sure. Computer-chess history did not end with Deep Blue, and is still alive and well on the ICC and freechess. The software that is being developed right now is A LOT better than anything the Deep Blue team ever came up with, and I have a feeling that if IBM hadn't pulled the plug on Deep Blue it would have probably lost its next match. But don't take my word for it, already Chess software is approaching the strength of Deep Blue by using hardware 1/100th as powerful. I'm sure that in 5-10 years the best machines will regularly beat the world champions on normal PCs.

  • If you ever get across to London... (Score:4, Informative)

    by mav[LAG] ( 31387 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:52PM (#3384245)
    ...you must go and see the working model of Babbage's difference engine #2 at the Science Museum [sciencemuseum.org.uk]. It was completed in 1991 by the staff using Babbage's drawings and worked first time.
    • Babbages Differential Engine No. 1 was gifted by Babbage to the "Kensington Musuem" after it secured the grant to build Engine No. 2 To quote Charles Babbage's autobiography "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher" It was commenced 1823. This portion put together 1833. The construction abandoned 1842. ... This portion was in the Exhibition 1862.
    • Actually, if you read The Difference Engine by Doron Swade (not Sterling+Gibson) you'll find that the drawings were not enough to actually build the device.

      There were some omissions (what materials to use for each part), unclarity (How was the device oiled?) and just plain errors (The "handedness" of the carry mechanism was exactly backwards and would not have worked in reality. Swade offers that it might have a deliberate error to prevent copying.)

      It didn't exactly work the first time either: he goes into some detail over the build process, which basically was "Add part, try to move the linkage, listen to a part go 'ping' as it breaks, find broken pieces, repeat until done."

      Still an amazing device- Babbage was way ahead of his time.

      Eric

    • Oddly enough, I've just returned from a week-long vacation (holiday, if you prefer) in London and was able to visit the Babbage exhibit.

      For as much as Babbage contributed, I found the exhibit extremely lacking in information and delinquent in relating the importance of his work.

      They did indeed have difference engine #2, however it was covered and being worked on by a couple gentlemen who did not appear willing or capable of fielding an inquiry.

      Also, the exhibit neglected to make any significant mention of Babbage's work outside of the difference engine(s): encryption, politics, analytical engine, etc.

      As a side note, I did, however, find that their weather exhibit was excellent and very informative. On the other hand, the mathematics exhibit was, like the Babbage exhibit, disappointing.

  • Steam Man (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 )
    When Professor Campion unveiled Boilerplate in 1893, the concept of a mechanical man was not a new one. Edward S. Ellis, in 1865, wrote about a prodigy that constructed a non-sentient automaton called the Steam Man. At the time, it was considered to be nothing more than an elaborate novelty item, like Boilerplate. Stories of its feats were relegated to the tabloids and "Edisonades." In the account entitled Steam Man of the Prairies (the first of several such publications), Johnny Brainerd, a teenage dwarf, invented "a man that shall go by steam." Here is how it was described: This is a later, cruder version [bigredhair.com]
  • How is The Turk different than modern chess programs today?

    Even the best chess programs (Big Blue, etc.) today require the input of humans. They are given instructions, and apply those instructions in a "brute force" fashion to all data in its parameters. The vast majority of the calculations that a computer is asked to make is pure bullshit.

    Human intelligence will always have the distinct advantage of eliminating a lot of worthless calculations.
    • Vision recognition is going to eliminate the need for humans to relay the board state, and there are contests in which AIs play games in which they dont know the rules, and must deduce them from the results of their actions.

      Also, computer are very good at following orders, unlike humans who have the "distinct advantage" of messing up over time.

      (im not trying to sound anti human, i rather like our species, its just theres some things that computers and machines do better then us, like assembly line work, and some things that we do better, like research)

      You shouldnt be bashing computers and programs for doing "worthless calculations", thats what we built the things for.

  • Some extra pictures to illustrate the story (Score:4, Informative)

    by afflatus_com ( 121694 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @05:58PM (#3384259) Homepage
    An excellent story, but a little bereft of graphics. Here are some extra pictures to flush out the idea of the device:

  • Good read... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by powerlinekid ( 442532 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @06:09PM (#3384287)
    Very interesting article... however I find it unfortunate that we don't know how he pulled the hoax off. Based on what I know about automata, it may be very possible to build a chess playing machine. However doing this a hundred+ years ago? I doubt it mostly due to the fact that creating the gears and other mechanisms needed required an amazing amount of time, skill and perfection. In fact this is why I heard Babbage's machine didn't work and the project fell through. I believe someone recently (if someone can find a article for this) built babbage's machine using the old blue-prints and it worked. Another thing is, if this is a hoax I wonder who was the playing the chess. The article definitly points out that the machine was very good at what it did. They only mention one case of it being beaten (along with the napoleon incident), which would mean whoever was playing was damn good. If someone was that good, why would they hide behind the guise of a machine and not reap the benefits of being one of the best chess players in the world? Oh well, definitly a good read though.
    Oh one more thing, the duck? They mention that it could take food out of a hand... how the hell did it do this? The last time I checked, motion sensors, digital cameras and such hadn't been invented yet. How the hell did the thing see where it was going, and have the ability to interact with a specific location?

    • Yeah, that's what I'm wondering as well. How the hell did it work? Who played the chess? Why was he so good? How did they control it from a distance? Was it placed under a table? Did someone twiddle something to operate the hands?

      The really annoying thing about this Turk story is that nobody seems to care about how it worked. People will just say, "You're missing the point of the whole story". I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE POINT SOMEBODY TELL ME HOW IT WORKED I MEAN THIS WEBSITE IS READ BY THE MOST INTELLIGENT PEOPLE IN THE WORLD MATHEMATICIANS ENGINEERS GEEKS SOMEBODY PLEEEEEAAASSEEEE!!!

      (breathe breathe)

      Please?

      Yuioup

    • In the wired article it says,

      The chess player had indeed been controlled by a concealed operator using a clever system of folding partitions to remain hidden while the automaton's interior was open to view.

      They mention it right at the end a while after they seem to drop the topic of the turk. As for the player I assume back then as with many sports nowadays only the best make lot's of money. I'm that he could of found a very good chess player who was happy for a significant cut of the money. Remember that he was beaten several times and while someone like Benjamin Franklin would no doubt be a very good chess player I doubt he had the experience to play at a highly competitive level. The thing I find strange is that it took them several years after it was destroyed to figure out that it was a hoax. One would think that in a museum they would have a chance to inspect it more closely than Maelzel would normally allow and find the person hidden.

      • Re:Good read... (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by quantaman ( 517394 )
        Oops!! forgot what day it is!!! Er.. Umm... I mean I'm just reminding you! Okay! okay! I'm gone now!
      • Thanks, I had missed *slightly embarassed* that part while skimming the article. However, I still don't think it completely explains everything, and the machine is still impressive even if it was nothing more that a midget in block of wood filled with gears. Its a shame it was destroyed in that fire, before anyone could really figure out how the whole thing worked (including the "Turk"'s movements, how the person inside could view the board and make appropriate movements, etc).

        • Re:Good read... (Score:3, Informative)

          by darien ( 180561 )
          I read in today's Sunday Telegraph that the chess pieces were magnetic, and each square on the board had a metal flap attached to the underside which was held up by the magnet. The chap in the box could see which flap had dropped and which had flipped up and so work out which piece had been moved where and replicate it on his own (probably miniature) chessboard. The same article also described that the Turk's arm was actually part of a pantograph, so the man inside just had to move a pointer to the relevant place on his chess-board and the Turk's hand would move to the same place on the outside board. He then simply had to squeeze the bulb/lever that made the Turk close its hand, move the pantograph pointer to the new square, and let go. A very ingenious and (I would imagine) well-executed piece of engineering.

          Afraid I threw the paper away, and I can't find the article on the web, but I'm 99% certain this is all from Tom Standage's book.

    • Re:Good read... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Restil ( 31903 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @06:33PM (#3384357) Homepage
      Even if you're REALLY good at something, if you play against someone whom you consider or assume to be considerably inferior to you, you will tend to unconsiously dumb down your strategy, and then even if you're a grandmaster, anyone of relatively decent skill will be able to beat you.

      The people playing the Turk weren't really playing to win. They were playing to see if this machine could play the game. They were too amazed by its ability to play AT ALL to bother much with trying to beat it. They might even intentionally make stupid "I wonder if he'll catch this" mistakes which ultimately sacrifice the game for them, no matter HOW good they might be.

      Probably the only time it got beat was the one time that someone actually paid attention to the game itself, rather than the opposing player.

      -Restil
      • I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the other Chess playing machines that were operated during the 19th century.

        Here's [cowderoy.com] a good article.

        Note that Mephisto was thought to be operated in 1879 by Gunsberg, probably one of the top 5 or 10 players of the time, and Aheeb was operated by Pillsbury between 1898 and 1904, which was during his prime. Pillsbury may have been the strongest player in the world for a few of those years, with a string of tournament successes and brilliant wins over the then World Champion Lasker.

        The players in these machines were often top players. I don't see any mention of these machines defeating world-class players, just notable Amateurs. Gunsberg and Pillsbury could easily defeat any Amateur regardless of the Amateurs having their guard up or down.

        The machines gained great reputations, some said they played flawlessly like a machine. I imagine that the players concentrated very hard to try and defeat them.

      • Well said. Gregory Bateson in his seminal book 'Mind and Nature' makes a case for learning by context. He cites experiments wherein a dog is made to distinguish between a circle and an ellipse. If the dog correctly distinguishes between the two it is rewarded, if not it is punished. The experiment proceeds with the ellipse being made evermore circular until the dog cannot make the distinguishment. Almost invariably the dog becomes neurotic. Bateson points out that learning is necessarily contextual and in the cited case the dog has made a context wherein the circle can be distinguished from the ellipse and when that context fails the dog's ability to learn, or, to make a critical distinguishment fails and results in a neurosis. Context sets our response and only the most 'aggresive' prodigies are able, or, naturally supercede context and remain centred on the analysis of the problem at hand. Consider the horror of sitting for finals. How often does the spectre of failure incapacitate? Just as an aside MicroSoft recently released some earnings figures and while a number of commentators keyed on growth or flat numbers, none, that I have read, have taken any note of a %12 [theregister.co.uk] drop in the sale of tools, yet, for decades, MicroSoft has touted it's tool set and development platform as key to it's success. I suspect in another context much would be made of this but the news had to do with the flat sales of Office and XP. We are both crippled and empowered by context... anyway time to curtail the rant.

        cheers
    • Post on Babbage's machne [slashdot.org]
      Thank you, see i knew i was right.
    • Edgar Allen Poe did a good analysis of the machine which he published (It may be available from the Gutenberg project for free... Why here [promo.net] it is.) Here [cowderoy.com]'s a link to some background info. Poe's essay is a good read, a little hard to follow without good diagrams but a good look into how smart he was.

      Don't know how the duck worked, so I can't help you there. But people can be amazingly clever with the tools on hand.

      Enkidu EOT

    • Here [upenn.edu] is an article on the book describing the Difference Engine and the quest to build it from the blueprints using only the available technology of Babbage's time.
  • For those of you too lazy to read the entire article:

    "The chess player had indeed been controlled by a concealed operator using a clever system of folding partitions to remain hidden while the automaton's interior was open to view."

  • Another story about this (Score:4, Informative)

    by neolith ( 110650 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @06:15PM (#3384303) Homepage
    James Randi did a nice write up about this, with some great pictures and commentary about the machine on his site [randi.org]. You can find a direct link to the articles here [randi.org] and here [randi.org]. I especially enjoyed the artwork depicting how the person inside fit in the contraption and enabled it to play chess. This was a very, very clever little hoax!

  • Impossible? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @06:18PM (#3384311) Homepage
    "Kempelen's contraption was, of course, a hoax. It would have been impossible to build a genuine mechanical chess player using 18th-century clockwork technology."

    Don't sell old technology too short. While a fully playing chess computer was beyond their reach, there were genuine automata in the 18th and early 19th century that could play end-games mechanically. Another examples of amizingly advanced automaton is the Swiss scribe, which can be programed to write a persons name with a quilt in long-hand, including pausing to dip the quilt in the ink well.

    That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today.

    Lastly the entire mechanism that allowed the chessmen to be grasped by a person from inside the Tuks was not replicated until a few decades back, again by "advanced" robotic research.

    • robotic arm (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bpb213 ( 561569 )
      "That would still be a challenging task for a robotic arm today"

      Not hardly. Mechanically extremely easy, we just have to write the software :)
  • So when's someone going to make an automaton that whacks people every time they build a website [theturkbook.com] with a background that makes it totally unreadable?
  • This is not the only chess playing machine.. There were others, most of them containing a chess playing midget. But then some man got really frustrated when he lost the game and shot the machine with his gun..

  • Othello/Reversi (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by evilviper ( 135110 )
    A Multi-Gigahertz processor.
    1.5 GB of DDR RAM.
    Dual 100 GB hard drives.
    A half dozen fans to cool the whole thing.

    AND I CAN'T FIND A GAME OF OTHELLO / REVERSI THAT CAN CONSISTENTLY BEAT ME.

  • Alan Turing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by benthesinister ( 574191 )
    Turing talked a lot about the Babbage Engine in his famous essay "Can Machines Think?" While that fact has very little bearing upon the article, Turing's essay touches upon the meaning of what it means to be human and whether it can be replicated. The Babbage Engine was his way of disproving that electricity is what makes humans human. Effectively it also banished the notion that it is any physical or quantifiable thing that makes humans human.

  • Other purposes (Score:4, Funny)

    by attackiko ( 170417 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @08:00PM (#3384636) Journal
    Those machines were not built just to get rich:

    In 1879 Mephisto (Gunsberg) went on tour, defeating every male player. However, when playing ladies, it would obtain a winning position, then lose the game, offering to shake hands afterwards

    .. but also to get chicks!

  • does anyone else find it ironic (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...that most of the first public appearances of computing technology appear to have been rigged demos?

    It seems like some things never change.

  • but Charles Babbage is NOT the father of computing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JDizzy ( 85499 ) on Sunday April 21, 2002 @11:40PM (#3385378) Homepage Journal
    We Americans would love to convince ourselves that we, rather Charles Babbage, invented the computer. The British have Allan Turing, and a Postal Inspector for their first computer, or so they like to think. However, the fact is that the first computer was invented by Konrad Zuse [about.com] (1910-1995) at the age of 28 (1938). Konrad was unfortunately living under a Nazi Dictatorship at the time. Turing was brilliant, and Zuse probably didn't hold a candle to Turing. However, I have to step in and make sure the bogus headline here on Slashdot does not perpetuate the silly myth. Konrad Zuse is the father of computing!

    • To quote from your link, he actually invented "first mechanical binary digital computer".

      Babbage [ex.ac.uk] still remains as the pioneer of programmable computing machines.

      A dont forget (one of) the first computer programmers, Ada Lovelace [ex.ac.uk], perhaps the Grandmother of computer programmers.

      • This seems kind of important dont you think? Ada was fidling around with programming. Surely anyone who wrote down how to do long division was a programmer too! Babbage was a legend, but just like all the people who say their inventions predated Edison, they never actually built them.
        • Difference Engine No. 1 was built by Babbage and his engineer, and is still on display in the London Science Museum. This is the small machine that stands about one meter tall, not the Engine that stands two meters tall with the Toshiba laptop to show the output.

          Engine No. 1 was demonstrated to the British Govt. to secure a Govt. grant to build the machine that was only completed in 1991.

          Ada's programs are still around on her original punchcards, a few are in the above museum, others are held in trust. (And there were other machines reading punchcards before this.)

          A machine based on Babbages original work was built and sold to the British Govt. in Babbages lifetime by the Swedish!

          -Roy

    • I notice this thread is filled with rather creative interpretations of the history of computing


      First of all, Charles Babbage was very British.


      While the Difference Engine wasn't much of a computer (but it was built, not by Babbage in the 1820's, but by Georg and Edvard Scheutz in 1843), the Analytical Engine, designed in 1834, was a punch card programmable mechanical computer with memory and an output printer. The Analytical Engine was never completed, however.


      As for Konrad Zuse's "Z" line of computers, they where revolutionary in that they were the first binary computers. The Z3, built in 1943, might be considered the first general purpose computer. The Z3 was a 250 mFLOPS 22-bit computer with 1408 bits of RAM (64 words).

    • Well it depends on how you define "computer". If you say Mechanical, then the Difference & Analytical engines are the first computers. If you say Electro-Mechanical, then Konrad Zuse wins. If you say Electronic with valves, then thats Turing (Which is debatable, I'll admit). If you say Electronic with transistors, then that the TX-0 & TX-2, which were built for the US Airforce (Or was it Navy? Anyone?).

      This doesn't even begin to include smaller adding machines, telephone switching systems and others. Deciding wether a relay is Electronic or Electro Mechanical is contentious as well.

      For the record, I'm British, so I count Babbage as the first ;)

  • Speech synthesis (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pipacs ( 179230 )
    According to Randi's description:
    "A small bellows and vibrating reed, a sort of artificial speaking mechanism, was incorporated whereby the operator could signal "check!" by forcing air through a tube. The approximation of the word "check" was said to lack clarity..."
    Randi says this was an improvement made by Maelzel, who bought the machine after von Kempelen's death, but I think this idea, too, came from Kempelen's work, who spent his last years researching speech synthesis. Quiet successfully as he actually did build [ling.su.se] a speech synthetizer capable producing whole words and short sentences. And this machine was not a trick: it is exhibited in the Deutches Museum in Munich, and, according to the author of the link I mentioned, still functional.

  • an almost forgotten programming language
    bears his name, because he was the one,
    about 1660, to build the first adding
    and multiplying machine....Babbage
    was surely aware of his work !
    • Babbage was well aware of his work and used Pascals punchcards in his designs. Ada, (another dying language!?!), programmed on these cards some of which are on public display beside the two Engines in Londons Science Museum. -Roy

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