Friday, October 22, 2010

WEEK 12 ESSAY

Discuss the impact of TWO of the following figures on the development of digital technologies and digital culture: Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, William Gibson, Kevin Mitnick, Alan Turing, Ray Kurzweil, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart.

Throughout history few people have had the honour of being at the forefront of a new age in technological advancement. But the two pioneering figures that will be discussed in this essay have had that very honour. These two technological figure heads are Charles Babbage and Alan Turing. In this essay we will be discussing the inventions that put, Babbage and Turing at the forefront of the technologies and digital culture age. These two inventions being the ‘Colossus (code breaking computer) for Alan Turing and the Difference Engine by Charles Babbage.

ALAN TURING

The story of Colossus has its beginnings not in America or even Britain, but Poland. In 1932 the Polish Cipher Bureau broke Enigma. This was the coding machine used by the German navy in 1926, followed by the army in 1928 and the air force in 1935. But in 1939 the Germans increased the use of a plug board which greatly increased the complexity of the enigma machine. In July of the same year the Polish government invited members of the British and French Intelligence services to Warsaw and for several months Poland and Britain collaborated on everything Poland knew about the German Enigma codes. One of the members on the team that travelled to Poland was a mathematician named Alan Turing. Turing made many fundamental contributions to the work of breaking the German codes. For instance Turing suggested modifications to the bomb electromechanical relay machines used by Poland to help break the enigma and other codes. These new machines came to be known as Turing’s ‘bombe’ (called bombs because of the ticking noise they made), or decoding machine. In its finished format the bombe contained thirty-six replica Enigma machines, with ten miles or wire and a million soldered connections. This new prototype named ‘Victory’ was installed at the headquarters for code breaking in Britain, Bletchley Park. 1942 Bletchley Park was decoding 39 000 Enigma messages each month and 84 000 a month by the autumn of 1943.

During 1942 Turing started work on a new problem, which was a new machine named ‘Tunny’ which the German army used to encrypt teleprinter messages. The Tunny machines were used for high level signals such as messages from Hitler and the German High Command. These machines were using the Lorenz cipher system, which used a binary additive method for enciphering teleprinter signals. The cryptographic structure of the Lorenz machine or Tunny as it was known at Bletchley Park was given away by a mistake made by a German operator on the 30th of August 1941. Bletchley Park or as it was known by some, the Allies code breaking establishment, set up a special department to attack the Lorenz cipher, which they very uniquely codenamed “Fish”. Staff within this secretive department at Bletchley Park had come up with a series of arduous hand methods, to show it was possible to decipher these messages. But even with the pioneering genius of their work, there was still a delay of four to six weeks between deciphering each message.

Professor Max Newman another mathematician who has been credited with the conceptual design of the resulting machines, that helped the code breakers analyse the cryptic messages. Realised that this drawn out process of a four to six week wait between each message being deciphered, needed to be dramatically overhauled to speed up the process. In March 1943 he approached Dr Tommy Flowers to design a machine to break the Lorenz cipher more quickly. This special event proved to not only be a turning point in the war, but a hugely significant and historic milestone in the history of not only electronics but also computers and even code breaking. For this very machine became known as Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer. It took Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Station ten months to complete Colossus. According to reports they worked day and night, pushing themselves until as Flowers (1976, p.42) said their “eyes dropped out.”

Yet with all its advantages that it produced, Colossus was not the same as a modern day computer we would see today. For instance to reset Colossus for a new job it was necessary for the wiring to be changed by means of switches and plugs. The idea behind how the Colossus computer would store memory, such as program instructions which is common place today came from Alan Turing. Once Turing saw that his ideas were feasible, he started drawing up plans in 1945 for an electronic stored program computer, to be called Automatic Computing Engine’.

CHARLES BABBAGE

But with all the success of Alan Turing and his fellow code breakers at Bletchley Park, none of their achievements would have been possible without the pioneering work of Charles Babbage. Babbage who was an inventor and mathematician was continually frustrated at the amount of errors being found in sets of mathematical tables he was reading, proclaimed, ‘I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam’ (Charles Babbage). Babbage’s frustrations not only were with the monotonous style of checking tables but also with their unreliabilty. Many trades of the day relied heavily on the accuracy of mathematical tables such as science, engineering, construction, banking and insurance. As well as ships navigating by the stars also relied on them t ofind their positions at sea. Babbage then set himself the task of designing and creating a calculating machine that would eliminate such errors. The ironic thing about Charles Babbage is that he is credited as inventing computers but he actually failed to completely build them.

Charles Babbage designed two different engines one being the Difference engine and the other being the Analytical engine. Difference engines are called difference engines because of the mathematical principle on which they are based, namely the method of finite differences. The difference engine machine uses only addition and removes the need for multiplication and division which are more difficult to implement mechanically. Difference engines are strictly calculators. They crunch numbers the only way they know how - by repeated addition according to the method of finite differences. They cannot be used for general arithmetical calculation. The Analytical Engine is much more than a calculator and marks the progression from the mechanised arithmetic of calculation to fully-fledged general-purpose computation. There were at least three designs at different stages of the evolution of his ideas. So it is strictly correct to refer to the Analytical Engines in the plural.

Difference Engine No. 1

Babbage began in 1821 with Difference Engine No. 1, designed to calculate and tabulate polynomial functions. The design describes a machine to calculate a series of values and print results automatically in a table. Integral to the concept of the design is a printing apparatus mechanically coupled to the calculating section and integral to it. Difference Engine No. 1 is the first complete design for an automatic calculating engine.

From time to time Babbage changed the capacity of the Engine. The 1830 design shows a machine calculating with sixteen digits and six orders of difference. The Engine called for some 25,000 parts shared equally between the calculating section and the printer. Had it been built it would have weighed an estimated fifteen tons and stood about eight feet high. Work was halted on the construction of the Engine in 1832 following a dispute with the engineer, Joseph Clement. Government funding was finally axed in 1842.

A New Difference Engine

With the groundbreaking work on the Analytical Engine largely complete by 1840, Babbage began to consider a new difference engine. Between 1847 and 1849 he completed the design of Difference Engine No. 2, an improved version of the original. This Engine calculates with numbers thirty-one digits long and can tabulate any polynomial up to the seventh order. The design was elegantly simple and required three times fewer parts than No. 1 for similar computing power.

Difference Engine No. 2 and the Analytical Engine share the same design for the printer - an output device with remarkable features. It not only produces hardcopy inked printout on paper as a checking copy, but also automatically stereotypes results, that is, impresses the results on soft material, Plaster of Paris for example, which could be used as a mold from which a printing plate could be made. The apparatus typesets results automatically and allows programmable formatting i.e. allows the operator to preset the layout of results on the page. User-alterable features include variable line height, variable numbers of columns, variable column margins, automatic line wrapping or column wrapping, and leaving blank lines every several lines for ease of reading.

The success of these men in their endeavours can not only be measured in terms of scientific or even historical value. But also in the number of lives these ground breaking devices saved from near certain death on the battle fields of Europe and the world and also the lives of sea-faring navigators. For “The successes of the World War Two Allied code breakers, some claim, shortened the war by up to two years.” (Plimmer, 1998, p37a) These men can also hold their heads high with those select few who have had the brilliance and tenacity to invent a machine that laid the historical and scientific ground work, for future generations to come. So whether you’re a computer literate person or not Charles Babbage and the men and women who worked endless hours to construct Colossus and other innovative machines during World War Two have to be considered as some of the founding forefathers of the early computer age.

REFERENCE LIST
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